EIU Astro

Still More Planets! November 17, 2008

To give an idea of how fast we are discovering exoplanets let’s show you a graph

Exoplanets as of September 2009

Over 300 and counting! Earlier last week we saw the release of the first photos of a palnet around another star. Now the good people from the Keck telescope have released the first photo of a solar system. Three planets orbiting a star. The star, HR 8799,  in the image was blocked to avoid the glare so you could see the much dimmer planets.

This photo was taken in the infra-red part of the spectrum using adaptive optics. The three planets are estimated to be about 10 times the mass of Jupiter. A simiar photo to this was take by th Gemini Telescope.

First Pictures of an Exo-planet! November 14, 2008

The Hubble space telescope released the first photograph of a planet around another star. Fomalhaut is a main sequence class A3 star about 25 light-years away . It’s the brightest star in the constellation Piscis Austrinus and one of the brightest stars in the night time sky.

The planet is named Fomalhaut-b. It follows a path along the edge of a vast dust ring that surrounds the star. At a distance of about 17 billion kilometers from Fomalhaut, it takes an estimated 872 years to complete one orbit. The planet is 100,000,000 times fainter than Fomalhaut, so the Hubble team used the Advanced Camera’s coronagraph to block out the star’s glare so that the planet could be seen. The region around Fomalhaut is black becauseof this process. This composite image was taken between 2004 and 2006. Since the dust ring has not been disrupted by the mass of the planet, this constrains Fomalhaute-b to be no more than 3 times the mass of Jupiter.