14 DAY TRIAL // It seems that once started, the exoplanet direct observation process is quickly becoming a regular one, given the discovery of such an object. A group of astronomers from France, led by Anne-Marie Lagrange, used images from the Very Large Telescope in order to pinpoint the location of a planet supposed to be approximately eight times the size of Jupiter and 8 AU (astronomical units - the distance between the Earth and the Sun) away from its star, Beta Pictoris.
Located in the astronomical proximity of our solar system, about 70 light years away, in the direction of the constellation of Pictor (the Painter), the Beta Pictoris star is very young - about 12 million years of age. As seen in the infrared picture, the planet appears more like a faint glow in the debris disk surrounding the star, but enough evidence can be drawn from this alone. Three different testing approaches were used in order to confirm that this was a real object.
"Our observations point to the presence of a giant planet, about 8 times as massive as Jupiter and with a projected distance from its star of about 8 times the Earth-Sun distance, which is about the distance of Saturn in our Solar System," shared Lagrange, quoted by Universe Today. "Moreover, the candidate companion has exactly the mass and distance from its host star needed to explain all the disc's properties. This is clearly another nail in the coffin of the false alarm hypothesis," she added.
If confirmed, this would be the exoplanet closest to its star observed so far. But Lagrange's colleague, Gael Chauvin, warns against premature speculations, "We cannot yet rule out definitively, however, that the candidate companion could be a foreground or background object. To eliminate this very small possibility, we will need to make new observations that confirm the nature of the discovery".