Likely First Photo of Planet Beyond the Solar System

ByRobert Roy Brittpublished10 September 2004

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Likely First Photo of Planet Beyond the Solar System — The red object appears to be a planet orbiting the brighter (but still relatively dim) brown dwarf star, seen here as blue-white.(Image credit: ESO/VLT)

A group of European-led astronomers has made a photograph of what appears to be a planet orbiting another star. If so, it would be the first confirmed picture of a world beyond our solar system.

"Although it is surely much bigger than a terrestrial-size object [like Earth], it is a strange feeling that it may indeed be the first planetary system beyond our own ever imaged," said Christophe Dumas, an astronomer at the European Southern Observatory.

Otherwise, all of the more than 120 known extrasolar planets have been detected indirectly, by noting the shadow of a planet crossing in front of a star or a planet's gravitational effect on a star. Because planets are so dim compared to stars, technology has not been able to spot them amid stellar glare.

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The object is still contracting into its final form and so is very warm, some 1,830 degrees Fahrenheit (1,000 Celsius), according to the research team, which was led by ESO's Gael Chauvin.

The photograph was made at ESO's Paranal Observatory in Chile with an infrared camera, which records heat rather than visible light. A system of adaptive optics on the Very Large Telescope (it's 27 feet wide, or 8.2 meters) corrects for blurring effects of Earth's atmosphere, making detailed observations possible.

One remaining question, however, is whether the thing might instead be a star that's in the foreground or background and not gravitationally bound to the brown dwarf, a scenario the researchers say is "statistically very improbable."

In separate work, Ray Jayawardhana of the University of Toronto has been studying the brown dwarf in question, 2M1207. He agrees that the newfound object is most likely in orbit around the brown dwarf. It could be a very dim brown dwarf in the foreground, he said, but that's doubtful.

The water found in the atmosphere, in the form of steam, "means it would have to be pretty cool and couldn't possibly be a star," Jayawardhana toldSPACE.com.

Jayawardhana's team found that 2M1207, like a real star, has a surrounding disk of hydrogen gas, the leftovers of the brown dwarf's formation. But in contrast to how planets probably developed in our solar system, he does not think the planet was born out of the brown dwarf's disk. Instead, the planet and brown dwarf likely "formed together out of a clump of gas and dust," he said.

Another unsettled issue is whether an object of five Jovian masses is truly a planet. Some astronomers put the upper limit for planetary mass at 13 times what's in Jupiter. Others argue that a planet is must orbit a star and have formed out of its leftovers. There is no official definition for the term "planet."

Jayawardhana doesn't care what the new object is called, it is still very interesting from a physics perspective.

"This discovery opens up a whole new regime of objects for us to look at and learn about," he said.

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Robert Roy Britt

Chief Content Officer, Purch

Rob has been producing internet content since the mid-1990s. He was a writer, editor and Director of Site Operations at Space.com starting in 1999. He served as Managing Editor of LiveScience since its launch in 2004. He then oversaw news operations for the Space.com's then-parent company TechMediaNetwork's growing suite of technology, science and business news sites. Prior to joining the company, Rob was an editor at The Star-Ledger in New Jersey. He has a journalism degree from Humboldt State University in California, is an author and also writes for Medium.

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