(ORDO NEWS) — No, you’re not seeing double: this photo shows two images of a Jupiter-like planet orbiting the star AF Leporis.
The image of the planet was taken by two independent teams of astronomers using the SPHERE instrument on the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile.
Two teams led by Dino Meza and Robert De Rosa studied the star catalogs from the Hipparcos and Gaia satellites.
For many years, these two space missions have accurately determined the position and movement of stars in our galaxy using astrometry.
The planets have a gravitational effect on the parent stars, changing their trajectory in the sky.
The two teams found that the star AF Leporis shows such a distorted trajectory, which is a clear sign that a planet may be hiding there.
When the two teams took a closer look at this system using the VLT, they were able to directly photograph the planet that orbits AF Leporis.
Both teams used the SPHERE instrument, which corrects for blurring caused by atmospheric turbulence and also blocks light from a star, revealing a planet near it.
Astronomers have found that the planet is only a few times as massive as Jupiter, making it the lightest exoplanet discovered using a combination of astrometric measurements and direct imaging.
The AF Leporis system has similar characteristics to the Solar System.
A star has about the same mass, size, and temperature as the Sun, and the planet orbits it at a distance similar to the distance between Saturn and the Sun.
The system also has a debris belt with similar characteristics to the Kuiper belt. Since the AF Leporis system is only 24 million years old, further studies of it could shed light on how our solar system formed.
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