Rare image of super-Jupiter captured

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – @BednarChuck

Astronomers using the ESO’s VISTA telescope and the Gran Telescopio Canarias have managed to obtain a direct image of a massive super-Jupiter located just 40 light years from Earth, making it the closest extrasolar world ever directly imaged from the ground.

According to CNET and io9 reports, the planet’s name is VHS 1256b, and while exoplanets are typically observed using indirect techniques such as measuring changes in the radial velocity of their host stars, this gas giant it close enough, bright enough, and far enough away from its sun to be viewed and distinguished using instruments right here on Earth.

The planet’s image was captured by a team from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, the Centre for Astrobiology and the Polytechnic University of Cartagena. Their findings are detailed in a paper currently available online and soon to be published in The Astrophysical Journal.

What a much younger Jupiter may have looked like

VHS 1256b orbits around an M-class or red dwarf star called VHS J125601.92-125723.9, and its solar system is believed to be between 150 million and 300 million years old. In comparison, our solar system is more than four billion years old. Furthermore, the gas giant’s orbit around its host star is said to be 100 times greater than the distance between the Earth and the sun.

The exoplanet is roughly 11 times the mass of Jupiter and has an orbit 20 times further than that world’s distance from the sun, but it was that distance from its host star that made it possible for the research team to isolate its full spectral range, including infrared, ultraviolet, and X-rays. The age of VHS 1256b leads the authors to believe that Jupiter would have looked similar back when it was far younger, some 4.2-billion years ago.

Bartosz Gauza, first author on the paper, explained that since the planet is still young, it has an atmosphere that is relatively warm (approximately 1,200 degrees Celsius) and that the exoplanet is “sufficiently luminous for us to be able to detect it” using the VISTA telescope. However, the large-diameter Gran Telescopio Canarias and the OSIRIS spectrograph instrument were needed to capture the planet’s full spectrum.

“The study of the red dwarf, a star on the borderline between low mass stars and brown dwarfs, has allowed us to determine the distance and the age of the system with great accuracy, and VHS 1256b is one of the few exoplanets for which those parameters are known,” concluded co-author María Rosa Zapatero Osorio, a researcher at the Centre for Astrobiology.

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