November 14, 2008 – 9:59 am by
Steele Wotkyns
A magnificent discovery in astronomy has just been made. It’s a discovery that in one experienced reporter’s words, “crossed an important threshold.” Travis Barman, Lowell Observatory astronomer,
was part of an international team that announced yesterday discovery of three planets orbiting the star HR 8799, and the first actual image of this, a newly discovered solar system. Emerging from the dust, like from the proto-planetary dust orbiting the star HR 8799 — making the discovery of the new planets that much more astonishing — are a few feature stories and highlights.
The Arizona Republic reports today that, “Images of gas giants may spur discoveries,” in Anne Ryman’s front page feature, 1st photos of planets outside our system. Here’s an excerpt:
An international science team that includes an astronomer at Flagstaff’s Lowell Observatory has captured the first images of planets orbiting a star outside our solar system… Scientists used the Keck and Gemini telescopes in Hawaii to photograph the star, then used a newly developed computer process to remove as much starlight as possible, revealing the three planets.
Also out of the extra-galactic volumes of dust from what should have been a pretty straightforward announcement of a major scientific discovery was this from The New York Times:
“I think Kepler himself would recognize these as planets orbiting a star following his laws of orbital motion,” Mark S. Marley of the Ames Research Center …, wrote in an e-mail message elaborating on HR 8799.
Today’s Christian Science Monitor includes an insightful and helpful feature story by veteran science writer Pete Spotts, Planet hunters snap first pictures of other solar systems, “The breakthrough images include a three-planet system around a sun-like star.” Here’s a couple of highlights:
Until now, researchers have had to content themselves with shadowy, indirect approaches to finding planets – measuring a regular wobble in a star’s spectrum as gravity from its massive
planets orbit and tug on it, or the cycle of brightening and dimming a star appears to experience as a planet crosses its face.
Exhibit A is the three-planet system found by a team led by Christian Marois, with the Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics in Victoria, British Columbia. The planets orbit a young star in the constellation Pegasus, dubbed HR 8799. By the team’s estimate, one planet tips the cosmic scales at seven times Jupiter’s mass. The other two are 10 times as massive as Jupiter.
“If you really want to study planet formation and evolution, you need to look backwards in time — and finding planets around progressively younger stars is just the way to do it,” says Lowell Observatory astronomer Dr. Barman.
USA Today’s online version ran an informative Q & A by Dan Vergano with Travis Barman about the discovery.
Check out a well-researched and illustrated Systemic blog post, (dated Nov. 13, 2008).
Here’s Lowell Observatory’s press release with images.
Here’s the discovery featured on Lowell Observatory’s research page.
And be sure to visit this link to the team’s paper, Direct Imaging of Multiple Planets Orbiting the Star HR 8799, to appear in an upcoming edition of the journal Science.
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