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switched on Hubble Space Telescope "Fomalhaut B"
Using a special camera of the space telescope Hubble has managed U.S. scientists, the first pictures of a planet 25 light years to shoot outside of our solar system. The planet is very similar to the gas planet Jupiter, and lies in the constellation of the Southern fish, said Paul Kalas of the U.S. University of Berkeley, whose team published the results.
Christian name: Fomalhaut B The so-called exoplanet orbiting
the 25 light-years distant star Fomalhaut in the southern sky, like the European Hubble Centre reported in Garching near Munich. He is the calculation that about three times as massive as the largest planet in our own system, the Jupiter. Astronomers had long been suspected of a planet Fomalhaut, but only now had himself photographed in the Trabant. He appears as a tiny speck in the picture and Fomalhaut B was baptized. should
to live Only one billion years
chances for life there in the Fomalhaut system be little: the star consumes its fuel so quickly that he had burned out in about a billion years. "This means that there is little opportunity for the development of advanced life on any habitable planet, the star has, perhaps," Hubble said the European Centre in Garching.
It is not the first discovery of a system of multiple planets around another star, but according to the astronomers for the first time that such a system could be photographed directly. "We have been trying for eight years to form planets - without success," said Bruce Macintosh of the discovery team. "We finally have a real image of an entire system. This is a milestone in the search and the classification of planetary systems."
planetary system scanned at a different star
A second group of researchers led by Christian Marois from the Canadian Research Council has succeeded for the first time a system of multiple planets in a different Stern to scan. Equal to three so-called exoplanets, they found on their infrared absorption at the 130 light-years distant sun HR 8799 in the constellation Pegasus. The researchers estimate the planetary system to the age of about 60 million years.
New worlds like an assembly line
begins a new phase of planetary research: Four planets are new to the list of known exoplanets.
link to FOCUS editor Michael Odenwald
Not one, not two - no, three planets in a single North American astronomers have photographed distant solar system. The cornucopia of new observations was to but not yet cleared. Another research group was a snapshot of a satellite that orbits the star Fomalhaut. Thus, the planetary research has entered a new phase. Up to now, the planet hunters could detect satellites that orbit distant stars, only indirectly. Mostly they were discovered by the "wobbling" of their suns, which is triggered when the gravity of their companions in one revolution are dragged back and forth. The quartet is now new to the list of the 322 known exoplanets.
Christian Marois of Canada The Research Council Herzberg Institute of
Astrophys, Canada
Hubble Centre in Garching in the discovery team Bruce Macintosh,
Germany
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