The Very Large Telescope in Chile has photographed a planet orbiting a star in a multi-star system located about 480 light-years from Earth.
The exoplanet15 times more massive than ours Solar Systemthe largest planet Jupiterit orbits a small star that itself orbits a larger one star. The larger star is also orbited by a brown dwarf, or “failed” asterisk. Brown dwarfs get their grim moniker because these objects aren’t massive enough to sustain nuclear fusion in their cores like typical stars do, but they’re still too big to be called planets.
The system of two stars and a brown dwarf, collectively called HIP 81208, has been known to astronomers for a long time. But the existence of an exoplanet orbiting a smaller star came as a surprise to astronomers who recently re-examined images of the system taken earlier by the European Southern Observatory (ESO). A very large telescope in Chile.
The newly discovered exoplanet is also quite massive, almost big enough to be called a brown dwarf.
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The team’s discovery represents the first hierarchical quadruple system to be found using direct imaging, ESO said declaration. Most exoplanets are discovered using the so-called transit method, which involves observing subtle dips in a star’s brightness caused by a planet passing in front of its disk from the observer’s point.
Direct imaging is essentially traditional photography. However, astronomers using this method to capture deep space worlds use very powerful telescopes and super-sensitive cameras to see planetary objects directly. And in the reanalyzed images, astronomers from the Paris Observatory detected a giant exoplanet forming a blob in the light ring surrounding its parent star.
The discovery will help astronomers further understand the formation of complex systems, ESO said in a statement.
