It looks like you're using an Ad Blocker.
Please white-list or disable AboveTopSecret.com in your ad-blocking tool.
Thank you.
Some features of ATS will be disabled while you continue to use an ad-blocker.
originally posted by: jerich0
a reply to: putnam6
Is there a link I can read more? That looks ominous, almost sinister.
European Telescope Takes First Picture of Another Solar System.
originally posted by: charlyv
This is cool. Thanks for bringing the update, OP. Remember reading about it last year and was in the Astro Journal..
Latest link I can see is this one:
First solar system imaged outside our own.
Just over 300 light-years away is a star that's a lot like a very young version of our Sun, with multiple exoplanets orbiting it. That's an interesting find in itself. But what makes the system truly dazzling is that it just became the first of its kind to be directly imaged, planets and all.
To date, only a few tens of exoplanets have been directly imaged, and only two other multi-planet systems - both around stars very different from the Sun.
But last year, using direct imaging, a team of astronomers led by Alexander Bohn of Leiden University in the Netherlands found an unusual planet orbiting TYC 8998-760-1.
It was a gas giant around 14 times the mass of Jupiter, orbiting the star at a distance of around 160 astronomical units. To put that in perspective, Pluto orbits the Sun at an average distance of 39 astronomical units.
This image, captured by the SPHERE instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope, shows the star TYC 8998-760-1 accompanied by two giant exoplanets, TYC 8998-760-1b and TYC 8998-760-1c. This is the first time astronomers have directly observed more than one planet orbiting a star similar to the Sun.
The two planets are visible as two bright dots in the centre (TYC 8998-760-1b) and bottom right (TYC 8998-760-1c) of the frame, noted by arrows. Other bright dots, which are background stars, are visible in the image as well. By taking different images at different times, the team were able to distinguish the planets from the background stars.
The image was captured by blocking the light from the young, Sun-like star (top-left of centre) using a coronagraph, which allows for the fainter planets to be detected. The bright and dark rings we see on the star’s image are optical artefacts.