(ORDO NEWS) — The Very Large Telescope (VLT), located in Chile, took a direct picture of a giant exoplanet that is relatively close to Earth – only 87.5 light years away.
The observations were described in two scientific articles at once.
It is reported that the Very Large Telescope was aimed at the region of the sky in which two research missions had previously registered an anomaly.
Astronomers were studying a young star called AF Leporis, which lies about 87.5 light-years from Earth in the constellation of the Hare, just south of the celestial equator.
Observations have shown that an invisible object exerts a gravitational influence on the star. He became the target of a new search.
“Planets are known to have a gravitational effect on their parent stars, disrupting their celestial trajectory,” ESO’s European Southern Observatory, which released the VLT images, said in a statement. that there might be a planet hiding there.”
The SPHERE adaptive optical system was used to obtain a direct image of the invisible planet. This tool is able to level out signal distortion caused by the Earth’s atmosphere.
As a result, the astronomers’ guess was confirmed – a giant planet was discovered in the system of a young star, which, according to preliminary calculations, is four to six times larger than Jupiter, the largest planet in the solar system.
Interestingly, the newly discovered planet orbits AF Leporis at about the same distance as Saturn orbits the Sun.
It is also noteworthy that this exoplanet is the lightest ever discovered using the signal distortion elimination method.
It is also reported that the star AF Leporis is comparable in its main parameters to the Sun – it is about as massive and as hot as our star.
However, AF Leporis is much younger than the Sun. According to scientists, its age is only 24 million years, that is, it is about 200 times younger than our star.
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