Scientific Gold Mine
Youthful planet
In this time-lapse image, an extrasolar planet (two points of light, center) is shown moving from one side of the star Beta Pictoris and its debris disk (blue and white) to the other
New images have confirmed that a tiny point of light first photographed near the star Beta Pictoris in 2003 is indeed an orbiting planet, one of only a handful of extrasolar planets ever imaged. At a youthful 12 million years of age, the planet, which weighs the equivalent of nine Jupiters, is the youngest ever directly recorded orbiting a star, providing firm evidence that massive planets can form in a hurry. The planet also lies much closer to its parent star slightly farther than Saturn's distance from the sun than any other extrasolar planet previously imaged. This will enable astronomers to track its complete orbit in less than 20 years, says Anne-Marie Lagrange of Université Joseph Fourier in Grenoble, France. She and her colleagues describe the new findings in an article posted online June 10 in Science. "People have been predicting the existence of this massive planet for many years, and these images are finally what we have been waiting for," says Christian Marois of the Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics in Victoria, Canada, who is not part of the team. Additional observations will provide new information on the composition of the atmosphere of this Jupiter-like planet, which lies about 65 light-years from Earth, notes Lagrange. Observations of the planet, dubbed Beta Pictoris b, will also reveal new details about its interaction with a disk of gas and dust known to encircle the star and extend beyond the planet. This debris disk is believed to have arisen from the dust generated by collisions within a reservoir of comets or asteroids. "This discovery will be a gold mine for scientists who study how planets form and evolve in the presence of a disk of comets and asteroids," comments astronomer Paul Kalas of the University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved in the new study.
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