300 light-years away, first direct image of a Sun-like star

An international team of astronomers has captured the first direct image of two planets orbiting a Sun-like star 300 light-years away from Earth, an extraordinary feat in itself.

In the image, these two planets appear as two bright dots around their central star.

It should be noted that the speed of light in space is 300,000 kilometers per second and the distance that light travels in space in one year is called “light year”.

So far, all the planets we have discovered orbiting other stars outside the solar system have been discovered based on fluctuations in the light from their host star or irregularities in the motion of that star. . This is the first time that a direct image of a planet orbiting another star has been obtained.

According to experts, the star around which these planets were discovered is still very “young” and formed “only” two million years ago. This star does not have a formal name, but its astronomical catalog number is TYC 8998-760-1; And it is located in a cluster called “muska” (bee). That is, we can say that the said solar system is still in the initial stage of its formation, as our solar system was 4 billion 60 million years ago.

Both of these planets are very heavy, one of them is 6 times more than Jupiter, the heaviest planet in our solar system, while the other one is 14 times more than our Jupiter.

Experts have also discovered that the nearest planet is orbiting at a distance of 160 AU from its star, while the farthest planet is at a distance of 320 AU.

An astronomical unit (Astronomical Unit or AU) refers to the average distance between the Sun and the Earth, which is about 150 million kilometers. For the sake of comparison, in our solar system, the planet Neptune is 30 AU from our Sun, while Pluto is only 39 AU from the Sun.

The discovery was made with the help of the Very Large Telescope (VLT), which is currently the most powerful and sensitive optical telescope on Earth. This observatory, managed by the European Southern Observatory (ESO), has been built in the remote Atacama desert of Chile. It consists of four telescopes, each of which has a mirror diameter of 8.3 meters.

By the way, these telescopes can be used separately, but for clear and better imaging of distant space bodies, these telescopes are integrated together in such a way that all four together are like a very large and powerful astronomical telescope. They work.

Full details of the discovery, published online in the latest issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters, reveal that the international team that made the discovery included members from the Netherlands (Netherlands), Belgium, the United Kingdom and the United States. Experts were involved.