Jupiter-like planet around distant star discovered by Stanford Researchers

A planet 100 light-years away looks like a newborn child form of Jupiter, cosmologists say.

The bulkier gas planet, which has an estimated two times the mass of our solar system’s biggest planet Jupiter and an atmosphere rich in methane, is in orbit around a star called 51 Eridani which is 96 light years from here. Rather, it is one of the youngest celestial balls on our galactic block.

The new world, known as 51 Eridani b, is only 20 million years old – a toddler by astronomical standards. Investigator Bruce Macintosh explained that the planet could have formed similarly to Jupiter, according to Fusion. Past Jupiter-like exoplanets have demonstrated just black out hints of methane, making them altogether different from the overwhelming methane environments of gas goliaths in our Solar System. Perhaps we might be able to confirm that super-earths were indeed destroyed by our much larger planetary neighbor. While this is not the youngest Jupiter-like planet to be discovered, scientists remark that 51 Eri b is very similar to Jupiter during its infancy. Older versions of direct imaging telescopes only detect exoplanets at relatively wide separations from their host star which are at distances greater than 10 AU (where 1 AU = average distance of the Earth to the Sun).

Washington Post reports that while NASA’s Kepler space observatory has discovered its fair share of planets, it does so indirectly by detecting a loss of starlight as a planet passes in front of its star. Since 51 Eri b is the first exoplanet found by the GPI, the high-power instrument is already showing plenty of early promise for space researchers. This puts it somewhere around the “20 million years ago” mark.

Saturday, 15 August 2015 06:05 Danielle Futselaar and Franck Marchis/SETI InstituteAn artist’s conception of the Jupiter-like exoplanet 51 Eridani b, seen in the near-infrared light that shows the hot layers deep in its atmosphere glowing through clouds. Even as Kepler searched for shadows or “obstructions of starlight” that indicated a planet, “faint, young planets ” that rotated around bright stars were also identified.

Temperature pegged at 800 degrees Fahrenheit, it’s viewed as one of the coldest exo planets discovered. GPI instead searches for light from the planet itself. “Many of the exoplanets astronomers have imaged before have atmospheres that look like very cool stars”.

After GPI was installed on the 8-meter Gemini South Telescope in Chile, the team set out to look for planets orbiting young stars.

The discovery provides an important clue for scientists trying to figure out how these types of gas-giant planets form and evolve. Eric Nielsen, who is a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University and the SETI Institute, quipped that the star was born 40 million years after the dinosaurs died. Any remaining incoming light is then analysed, with the brightest spots indicating a possible planet.