New planet discovered in orbit of young Milky Way star
 |
| ||||||||
a fledgling star in our own galaxy offering astronomers a
rare glimpse of a planetary system in the making, according
to a study published Monday.
“We talking about a giant planet about 3,000 times more
massive than Earth, situated 2.7 times further from its star
than the Earth is from the Sun,” said Anne-Marie Lagrange,
an astronomer at France’s National Centre for Scientific
Research and lead author of a study in Nature Astronomy.
The new planet, b Pictoris c, completes its orbit roughly
every 1,200 days. Like its big sister b Pictoris b, discovered
by Lagrange and her team in 2009, it is a gassy giant.
Visible with the naked eye, Beta Pictoris — with a mass
nearly twice that of the Sun — is a newborn by comparison:
only 23 million years old.
The Sun is more than 4.5 billion years old.
It is also relatively nearby, just over 63 light-years, and
surrounded by a disk of stellar dust.
This swirling halo of debris and gas was the first such
configuration to be captured in image, making Beta Pictoris
a celebrity star in the 1980s.
“To better understand the early stage of formation and
evolution, this is probably the best planetary system we
know of,” Lagrange told AFP.
Observations show that the two planets are still taking
shape.
B Pictoris c was discovered by analysing 10-years worth of
high-resolution data obtained with instruments at the La
Silla Observatory in northern Chile, run by the
intergovernmental European Southern Observatory.
In 2014, scientists said b Pictoris b spins at a breakneck
speed of some 25 kilometres per second (90,000 kph or
56,000 miles per hour).
Located in the southern constellation of Pictor — “The
Painter’s Easel” — Beta Pictoris is the second brightest star
in its constellation.
Vanguard
Comments
Post a Comment