The discovery is reported August. 13 in the online edition of the journal Science. It is situated in a region that is flawless for the existence of a gas giant much akin to our gas giants, Saturn and Jupiter.
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The greater part of outsider galaxies that have been found are altogether different from our own, with enormous planets – purported “hot Jupiters” – circling near their stars.
The alien world could yield clues to the formation of our Solar System, which has an unusual lay-out.
The spectrograph produces 18 images at different wavelengths of light, which enables GPI to reject light from nearby stars, which can be up to 10 million times brighter than the planets being studied.
For reference of age, the planet was first formed 40 million years after the dinosaurs went extinct. Other UCLA co-authors are Benjamin Zuckerman, a professor of physics and astronomy; and graduate students Thomas Esposito, Li-Wei Hung and Pauline Arriaga.
Bruce Macintosh, a professor of physics in the Kavli Institute at Stanford, heads the Gemini Planet Imager program.
“Many of the exoplanets astronomers have imaged before have atmospheres that look like very cool stars”, Macintosh said. Astronomers are finding more and more celestial bodies that greatly resemble our planets, but this is the youngest one scientists have managed to find to date.
The 20-million-year old exoplanet helps scientists to know how the Solar System had evolved from what it is today.
Meanwhile, the direct-imaging device was mounted to a Gemini South Telescope, which measures 27-foot-long and located in Chile. The GPI team has studied nearly 100 stars already.
The new Jupiter-like planet has mass about twice as big as our Jupiter, and orbits its sun at a similar distance as Saturn. “Since the atmosphere of 51 Eri b is also methane rich, it signifies that this planet is well on its way to becoming a cousin of our own familiar Jupiter”, said Mark Marley, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, co-lead for theory and a team member responsible for helping to interpret GPI observations. From its creation, the planet’s surface glows with heat at 800 degrees Fahrenheit.
This is for the first time when large amounts of methane have been detected in the atmosphere of an exoplanet. Scientists have also taken some wonderful pictures of the planet.
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GPI will provide new insights about how solar systems form. “Over the next hundred millions years they radiate that energy away, mostly as infrared light”, says Macintosh. But the Jupiter-like exoplanets that have been discovered so far are much hotter than models have predicted, hinting that they could have formed much faster as material collapses quickly to make a very hot planet.
