CNRS: A Second Planet in the Beta Pictoris System

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CNRS: A Second Planet in the Beta Pictoris System

Post by bystander » Mon Aug 19, 2019 5:37 pm

A Second Planet in the Beta Pictoris System
National Center for Scientific Research, France (CNRS) | 2019 Aug 19
A team of astronomers led by Anne-Marie Lagrange, a CNRS researcher at the Institut de Planétologie et d’Astrophysique de Grenoble (CNRS/Université Grenoble Alpes), has discovered a second giant planet in orbit around Beta Pictoris, a star that is relatively young (23 million years old) and close (63.4 light-years) and surrounded by a disk of dust. The Beta Pictoris system has fascinated astronomers for the last 30 years since it enables them to observe a planetary system in the process of forming around its star. Comets have been discovered in the system, as well as a gas giant, Beta Pictoris b, detected by direct imaging and described in 2009 by Lagrange’s team.

This time, the team had to analyse more than 10 years of high-resolution data, obtained with the HARPS instrument at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile, in order to indirectly detect the presence of Beta Pictoris c. This second giant planet, which has a mass nine times that of Jupiter, completes its orbit in roughly 1,200 days and is relatively close to its star (approximately the distance between the Sun and the asteroid belt, whereas Beta Pictoris b is 3.3 times more distant). The researchers hope to find out more about the planet from data from the Gaia spacecraft and from the future Extremely Large Telescope now under construction in Chile.

Evidence for an Additional Planet in the Beta Pictoris System ~ Anne-Marie Lagrange et al
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