The birth of 51 Eri took place some 20 million years ago, 40 million years after the dinosaurs died out. In turn, this would mean the planetary system it is part of is not all that different to our own.
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The planet’s name is 51 Eridani b and the distance between her and her sun is approximately 13 times the distance in between Earth and Sunday.
“This looks at really far-out planets – no pun intended”, Patel said.
Macintosh speculated the solar system 51 Eridani b belongs to may be very similar to Earth’s. 51 Eridani b was discovered by the Gemini Planet Imager or GPI.
The instrument uses a different process than NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope to find planets. It actually searches for the light being emitted from planets, called direct imaging.
The newly found exoplanet is orbiting around the star 51 Eri, one of the youngest stars located so near to our sun, presenting a flawless arena for imaging young planets, a co-author of the study, Eric Nielsen, told the Stanford News.
Although much younger, 51 Eridani b is twice the mass of Jupiter.
For now, the researchers will work on studying the new planet’s orbit and better pinning down its chemical makeup, as well as keeping an eye out for more planets within the system. More precisely, they say it probably formed from a large rocky core that, over the years, pulled in gases from its surroundings and fashioned itself an atmosphere.
In addition to methane, spectrographic analysis of the planet shows water, both also thought to exist deep in the atmosphere of Jupiter. As planet-hunting telescopes have scanned the starry heavens, they’ve discovered all kinds of unusual worlds that are unlike those in our own solar neighborhood: hot Jupiters, super-Earths, mini-Neptunes.
The image at the top of the page is an artist’s concept shows a cloudy Jupiter-like planet that orbits very close to its fiery hot star.
“Many of the exoplanets astronomers have studied before have atmospheres that look like very cool stars”, study lead author Bruce Macintosh, a professor of physics in the Kavli Institute at Stanford University who led the construction of GPI, said in the release.
51 Eridani b features to be the faintest planet ever imagined along with strongest atmospheric methane signal and temperature of 400 Celsius- making it the coldest planet.
“The discovery was pretty exciting because it’s exactly what the Gemini Planet Imager was made to do”.
Unlike in the case of Kepler where exoplanet detection is based on shadow formed when a planet passes in front of a star, the Gemini Planet Imager looks for the planet’s glow.
GIP is so sensitive that it was able to spot the exoplanet that is three million times fainter than its star.
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“51 Eri b is the first [detected exoplanet] that’s cold enough and close enough to the star that it could have indeed formed right where it is the ‘old-fashioned way, ‘ ” he says.
