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rfmcdonaldSol Station is a website that I visit on a semi-regular basis for its excellent and comprehensive information on various astronomical objects in the neighbourhood of Earth, the informatiln on nearby stars being particularly comprehwnsive and as close to a home page as (say) 51 Pegasi is likely to have. The website's operators update the information on the site regularly, kindly letting visitors know about these updates by having the hyperlinks to the updated pages of these objects blink on and off. One of the star pages most recently updated is that of Beta Pictoris.
Beta Pictoris is a hot blue-white star a bit more than sixty-three light-years from Earth, similar to Sirius and Vega that first came to prominence in 1983, when the IRAS infrared astronomy satellite detected dense debris belts in orbit of this star only twelve million years old. The image below shows these belts, with Beta Pictoris blocked out to leave the belts visible.
This picture, taken from the page Solar System Structure and Origin, shows the protoplanetary belts in orbit of the young star Beta Pictoris.
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei
Later observations following up on this discovery have examined the star and these belts in much greater detail, discovering not only the fine structure of these belts but finding indications that large planets exist in orbit around Beta Pictoris. In particular, gaps in the distribution of the debris lead astronomers to believe that a massive planet exists in a gap in the debris, likely a gas giant. What's very interesting about this Beta Pictoris gas giant is that it may well have been imaged in 1981. I quote below from the Sol Station page.
This planet may have been photographed in 1981, twenty-seven years before its confirmation, more than a decade before the confirmation of the first gas giant planets discovered via the modern radial-velocity method. This is a discovery as precious as Galileo's discovery of Neptune, a piece of knowledge so far advanced as to be unrecognized to its contemporaries. I'm impressed by this, to be honest, and I wonder what observations have bee made, stored even now in digital images or even photographic plates, that have gone unrecognized. Finding another Beta Pictoris-like discovery would be so cool.
Beta Pictoris is a hot blue-white star a bit more than sixty-three light-years from Earth, similar to Sirius and Vega that first came to prominence in 1983, when the IRAS infrared astronomy satellite detected dense debris belts in orbit of this star only twelve million years old. The image below shows these belts, with Beta Pictoris blocked out to leave the belts visible.
This picture, taken from the page Solar System Structure and Origin, shows the protoplanetary belts in orbit of the young star Beta Pictoris.
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei
Later observations following up on this discovery have examined the star and these belts in much greater detail, discovering not only the fine structure of these belts but finding indications that large planets exist in orbit around Beta Pictoris. In particular, gaps in the distribution of the debris lead astronomers to believe that a massive planet exists in a gap in the debris, likely a gas giant. What's very interesting about this Beta Pictoris gas giant is that it may well have been imaged in 1981. I quote below from the Sol Station page.
According to a paper submitted for publication in March 2009, planetary candidate b may have been observed to transit Beta Pictoris on November 10, 1981, which was recorded by the Geneva Observatory in Switzerland as having produced "strong and rapid photometric variations." By the mid-1990s, astronomers had published papers suggesting that the dimming of Beta Pictoris in 1981 was due either to the transit of a giant comet (Lamers et al, 1997) or of a planet in front of the star (Lecavelier des Etangs, 1997; Lecavelier des Etangs, 1995; and Lecavelier des Etangs, 1994). If planet b did transit the star in 1981, then it should have an average orbital distance from Beta Pic of 7.6 to 8.7 AUs and a period of 15.9 to 19.5 years, assuming a mild orbital eccentricity of e= 0.1 (Lecavelier des Etangs and Vidal-Madjar, 2009; and New Scientist, March 30, 2009).
On November 21, 2008, a team of astronomers (including Anne-Marie Lagrange, Gael Chauvin, David Ehrenreich, David Mouillet, Damien Gratadour, Gérard Rousset, Daniel Rouan, Eric Gendron, Thierry Fusco, Laurent Mugnier, Nicole Allard, and the NAOS Consortium) announced that they may have imaged a giant planet "b" in orbit around Beta Pictoris using the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (ESO press release, and Lagrange et al, 2008). Although intensely radiating infrared light with the heat of formation at around 1,500 degrees Kelvin, the planetary candidate is still roughly a thousand times dimmer than its hypothesized parent star. If the object is a true planetary companion, then it may have around eight Jupiter-masses.
The object is located around eight AUs from Beta Pictoris within the relative central void (which has a diameter around 50 AUs) of the star's circumstellar dust disk. Supporting the possibility that the object is an orbiting planet, it is also located along the plane of the disk and is "consistent with the morphological and dynamical percularities" of the disk (Lagrange et al, 2008). New observations are planned to rule out the possibility that the object is instead a foreground or background object, which has already been rejected by archival images taken with the Hubble Space Telescope (ESO press release, and Lagrange et al, 2008).
This planet may have been photographed in 1981, twenty-seven years before its confirmation, more than a decade before the confirmation of the first gas giant planets discovered via the modern radial-velocity method. This is a discovery as precious as Galileo's discovery of Neptune, a piece of knowledge so far advanced as to be unrecognized to its contemporaries. I'm impressed by this, to be honest, and I wonder what observations have bee made, stored even now in digital images or even photographic plates, that have gone unrecognized. Finding another Beta Pictoris-like discovery would be so cool.
