Subscription Center
November 20, 2012 | 5
Astronomers using the Subaru Telescope in Hawaii recently discovered (pdf) a "super-Jupiter" orbiting the star Kappa Andromedae (κ Andromedae) a star about 2.5 times the mass of our sun located about 170 light-years from Earth.
κ Andromedae is a young star, only 30 million years old, compared with our sun's age of five billion years. Its companion planet, κ Andromedae b, is about 12.8 times Jupiter's mass and orbits at about 1.8 times the distance between Neptune and our sun. Astronomers are not entirely sure whether it is a huge planet or a low-mass brown dwarf, an entity in between planet and star.
Joe Carson, an astrophysicist at the College of Charleston and the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy and lead author of the paper describing the discovery, says that the most exciting part of the discovery is that κ Andromedae "is by far the most massive star where we see evidence of normal planet formation—the kind that went on in our solar system."
κ Andromedae b is also one of the few exoplanets astronomers have seen directly. Although exo-worlds are plentiful, they can be difficult to see because stars are about a billion times brighter than planets. "There's this teeny signal from the planet—it's completely overwhelmed by the star," Carson says. For that reason, most planets are discovered by indirect means, such as when a planet passes in front of its host star and blocks some of its light.
Carson says that to directly photograph κ Andromedae b the team had to filter out as much of the star's light as possible. "In astronomy we can subtract two images from each other the same way in mathematics we subtract two numbers," he says. But simply subtracting one image from another would also subtract out any light from a hidden planet. So the astronomers took multiple "snapshots" of the region of the sky containing the κ Andromedae system, rotating the telescope between shots. Because the star's light is basically symmetric, subtracting the light of the rotated images canceled out the light of the star, which remained at the center of the images, leaving the light of the planet, which moves around as the telescope is rotated.
The image above was created by coloring an infrared image of the system. The star is artificially eclipsed by a disc in the middle. The planet is the bright yellow dot in the upper left, and the speckled pattern around the disc is residual light from the image-subtraction process.
Carson says that this discovery opens the door for many follow-up studies. Further studies using different wavelengths of light will tell astronomers more about the planet's atmosphere, which will help them determine its mass, temperature, weather—and even discern if the planet might have Saturn-like rings. More broadly, "when you have one planet around a star, there's a good chance there's one or more other planets around the star," Carson says. Because astronomers didn't even know that such a massive star could support normal planetary formation, the study of all the planets in the system could prove especially fruitful. "It's like opening a treasure chest of new discoveries," he adds.
—Evelyn Lamb
See what we're tweeting about
philipyam @dcastelvecchi @Yahoo It's annoyingly hidden in your name, forcing you to hover over it to see. But still not as bad as Gmail's
BoraZ I can co-sign: Alexis Madrigal: “Follow your own curiosity” http://t.co/8HLCJ1wX8W #sci4hels BoraZ How to Really March Against Monsanto. http://t.co/u93UxagQfT cc @Kevbonham @sci2mrow @patrickmustain @juliannewyrick
Deadline: Jul 25 2013
Reward: Varies
This challenge provides an opportunity for Solvers to build a web-based or mobile “app” to explore data relationships in scholarly conte
Deadline: Jul 30 2013
Reward: $100,000 USD
The Seeker desires a method for producing pseudoephedrine products in such a way that it will be extremely difficult for clandestine che
Powered By: 
YES! Send me a free issue of Scientific American with no obligation to continue the subscription. If I like it, I will be billed for the one-year subscription.
5 Comments
Add CommentCuriously, now this revised article's heading refers to the planet as a "Captured World". While I think it's referring to it's 'captured' image, perhaps this almost-brown-dwarf-star (depending on the veracity of it's estimated mass) might also have been gravitationally captured by its relatively new, possibly independently developed, host star...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou call it a "tomato" I call it a "tamoto".
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFor years I've wondered if it was possible to detect a planet by subtracting one photo from another one taken several months apart. Here they've done it by rotating the camera between photos, although I don't see why they couldn't have simply used a single image and subtracted a rotated version of the same image. Anyway, I'm glad that the method works; it could yield some interesting results when applied to closer stars.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Super upiters" are a natural, run-of-the-mill planetary bodies in the fragmentation process of evolution of celestial bodies in this fractal universe of ours.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBased on computer simulations Mark Krumholz from Princeton University, Christopher McKee from the University of California at Berkeley, and Richard Klein from Berkeley and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory now claim [Nature 438, 332-334 (2005)] that the bottom-up theory is incorrect because the seeds cannot grow fast enough during the lifetimes of the clouds to reach typical star sizes. …
"Our result is that the bottom-up idea doesn't work," Krumholz told PhysicsWeb, "because seeds can't accrete quickly enough to grow to stellar masses within the lifetimes of the clouds out of which they are born. Instead, stars form by fragmentation, and the fragmentation process determines their masses."
The results also explain, the team says, why observations suggest that objects as different as small brown dwarfs and massive stars have a common formation mechanism. In contrast, the accretion model involves different mechanisms for making objects with different masses. A universal formation process might also explain why the mass distribution of newly formed stars – the initial mass function – seems to be constant throughout our galaxy and other galaxies.
"Many earlier simulations of star formation processes made a significant error because they modelled environments with properties that are very different from those observed," says Krumholz. "A lot of these simulations are now going to have to be reconsidered and probably re-done."
How do stars form? Belle Dumé, PhysicsWeb, 16 November 2005.
Therefore, in the fragmentation process of evolution of a star cluster (from ejection of the stellar matter from the central, galactic core in a nova-like upheaval), bodies smaller than brown dwarfs would fail star-billing and would cool off rapidly as planetses, the largest of which we would see as "Jjupiters."
Get the evolutionary pictures for that final paradigm shift amply illustrated in:
http://www.sittampalam.net/StarFormation.htm
http://www.sittampalam.net/TheQuaternary.htm
http://www.sittampalam.net/TheCosmos.htm
http://www.sittampalam.net/TheGalaxy.htm
http://www.sittampalam.net/TheSun.htm
Thank you all for your time here.
Cheers!
www.toe.tv
@vitog: By rotating the camera, you ensure that any artifacts introduced into the image from the lens/mirror/sensor system is replicated in the same positions and would then be canceled out by this subtractive method. By only rotating the image, you could introduce these artifacts as noise or worse, false positives. Actually, newer DSLR cameras use a similar technique to reduce pixel noise with image captures with long exposures in high ISO/sensitivity ranges.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this