Scientists find water on unusual Jupiter-like planet

In addition, Western University astronomy professor Stanimir Metchev notes that the planet’s debris is actually quite comparable to the ice and dust grains produced by collisions of asteroids and comets we are familiar with, in our solar system.

Twenty years ago, planet scientists had what seemed like a solid model of planet formation, Macintosh said, before telescopes revealed a whole swath of exoplanet solar systems that evolved very differently from our own.

Patel goes on to say, “It’s a step toward finding something that looks like our solar system and that’s insane fantastic because it’s really important in understanding how our solar system may have formed”. “The current properties of 51 Eri b may hold a record of its formation history, and future studies of its atmosphere will hopefully unlock new information about planet formation in general”. While Kepler looks for shadows or obstructions of starlight that could signify a planet, GPI was designed to discover faint, young planets orbiting bright stars. This hints that they could have formed quickly – as gas collapses to make a scorching planet in what is known as a “hot-start”.

Meanwhile, the direct-imaging device was mounted to a Gemini South Telescope, which measures 27-foot-long and located in Chile. What do we know about the massive, young world of 51 Eridani b? A team of more than a hundred scientists led by Bruce Macintosh at Stanford University and James Graham at UC Berkeley, continues to search for additional planets around 600 nearby stars.

Astronomers are hopeful that the recent discovery of a Jupiter-like planet around a distant star could help them unravel the mystery of how our own solar system came into existence. This new planet is similar to Jupiter, a similarity that could shed light on the evolution of the largest planet in our solar system. It is also less hot than other newly formed exoplanets, at only 800 degrees Fahrenheit.

Any remaining incoming light is then analyzed, and the brightest spots indicate a possible planet. Jupiter is closer to 4.5 billion years old, so by contrast, 51 Eridani b is a planetary infant.

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.

“Many of the exoplanets astronomers have imaged before have atmospheres that look like very cool stars”, said Macintosh. The planet 51 Eridani b is young enough to reveal clues about how it was created. Previously detected gas giants have been five to thirteen times Jupiter’s mass. While Jupiter is much older than the young planet, 51 Eridani b is still nearly twice the size of the largest planet within our solar system.

The Gemini Planet Imager Exoplanet Survey (GPIES) campaign is partially funded by National Science Foundation (NSF), NASA, the University of California and the Laboratory Directed Research and Development funding at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.