Just when you thought science had already made most of its key, dramatic discoveries there’s this news: advanced technologies have helped European and American astronomers to take the first-ever picture of a planet outside our solar system.
It seemed to be a red speck and some insisted it was a star some 225-light years away from Earth in the Hydra constellation. But scientists now say a Very Large Telescope in Northern Chile has confirmed its true status.
The New York Times notes that scientists earlier believed this was a planet, but couldn’t prove it — but the use of advanced technology seemingly clinches the case.
A reddish speck photographed near a dim and distant star last year is indeed a planet, about five times the mass of Jupiter, an international team of astronomers is reporting today.
They say the results bolster their claim, put forward last fall, that this image was the first of a planet orbiting a star outside the solar system.
The planet, about 230 light-years from Earth in the constellation Hydra, orbits a kind of failed star known as a brown dwarf at a distance of at least 5 billion miles, twice as far as icy Neptune is from our own sun. Spectroscopic measurements show water vapor in its atmosphere, suggesting that it is cold like a planet and not hot like a star.
“This discovery offers new perspectives for our understanding of chemical and physical properties of planetary mass objects as well as their mechanisms of formation,” Gael Chauvin of the European Southern Observatory in Chile and his colleagues wrote in the paper, in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.
When Chauvin’s group first announced the discovery of the object, known officially as 2M1207b, last year, they admitted that they could not prove that it was not just a background object unrelated to the brown dwarf.
Subsequent observations using the Very Large Telescope on Cerro Paranal in northern Chile and a system designed to take the twinkle out of starlight and thus get sharper images showed that the dwarf star and the suspected planet were moving together across the sky, cementing the notion that they are gravitationally bound.
The AP’s story contains this cautionary note:
Lynne Hillenbrand, an assistant professor of astronomy at the California Institute of Technology, said the findings were intriguing, but cautioned against calling the object a planet.
“The claim of an object being a planet is subject to one’s definition of planet and there are different camps on what that definition is,” Hillenbrand said.
In recent months, different groups of astronomers have published competing claims about directly observing extrasolar planets.
Earlier this month, German astronomers published a photograph of an object 450 light-years from Earth that they claimed was the first direct image of an extrasolar planet. But astronomers sparred over the photo, saying that it was possible that it could be a brown dwarf based on the object’s mass.
Last month, scientists using NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope said they directly measured light from two known Jupiter-sized gas planets orbiting distant stars, but did not get images of the planets separate from their stars.
Outlook: as technology becomes even more advanced more of the vague areas will be totally cleared up.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.