NASA | JPL-Caltech | California Institute of Technology | 2017 Jan 30
[img3="An image of the brown dwarf HIP 79124 B, which is separated from its host star by 23 astronomical units (an astronomical unit is the distance between our sun and Earth). The vortex coronagraph was used to suppress the much brighter host star, allowing its dim companion to be imaged for the first time. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech"]http://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/www-p ... age004.jpg[/img3][hr][/hr]A new instrument on the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii has delivered its first images, showing a ring of planet-forming dust around a star and, separately, a cool star-like body, called a brown dwarf, lying near to its companion star.
The device, called the vortex coronagraph, was recently installed inside the Near Infrared Camera 2 (NIRC2), the workhorse infrared imaging camera at Keck. The vortex coronagraph has the potential to image planetary systems and brown dwarfs closer to their host stars than was possible previously. It was invented in 2005 by Dimitri Mawet while he was at the University of Liège in Belgium. Mawet is currently associate professor of astronomy at Caltech and a senior research scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). The Keck vortex coronagraph was built by the University of Liège, Uppsala University in Sweden, JPL, and Caltech.
“The vortex coronagraph allows us to peer into the regions around stars where giant planets like Jupiter and Saturn supposedly form,” says Mawet. “Before now, we were only able to image gas giants that are born much farther out. With the vortex, we will be able to see planets orbiting as close to their stars as Jupiter is to our Sun, or about two to three times closer than what was possible before.” ...
The W. M. Keck Observatory Infrared Vortex Coronagraph and a First Image of HIP 79124 B - Eugene Serabyn et al
- Astronomical Journal 153(1):43 (Jan 2017) DOI: 10.3847/1538-3881/153/1/43
arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1612.03093 > 09 Dec 2017
- Astronomical Journal 153(1):44 (Jan 2017) DOI: 10.3847/1538-3881/153/1/44
arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1612.03091 > 09 Dec 2017