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Blogs / Bad Astronomy



Astronomers see exoplanet orbiting its parent star!


This is extremely cool news: astronomers have, for the first time, directly seen an exoplanet orbiting its star from one side to the other!

This picture is actually a composite of three separate observations. The outer part with the blue fuzzy stuff was observed in 1996, and I’ll get back to that in a sec. The good stuff is in the center: two images of the planet, called Beta Pic b, are superposed in the picture; it was observed in 2003 (left blob), then again in late 2009 (right blob). Observations taken just months before in 2008 and 2009 observation didn’t show the blob at all — it must have been too close to the star to be seen clearly — indicating this really is a planet orbiting the star, and not just some background object like a star or galaxy. In other words, astronomers have captured the motion of the planet as it physically moved from one side of the star to the other!

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/ba...s-parent-star/