[LINK] More on Beta Pictoris b

[rfmcdonald]

More on Canadians and exoplanets!

CBC News' Emily Chung reports on new high-resolution pictures of Beta Pictoris b.

A crisp portrait of a planet 56 light years away has been captured by a new high-tech planet-hunting camera developed largely by Canadians.

The Gemini Planet Imager snapped an "amazingly clear and bright" image of the gas giant Beta Pictoris b after an exposure of just one minute, said Quinn Konopacky, a University of Toronto researcher who co-authored a new scientific paper describing the feat.

"I was very, very excited," recalled Konopacky of her first time seeing the planet's portrait, in an interview with CBC News Monday.

[. . .]

The new image and information about the planet teased out of the image data are being published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this week by an international team led by Bruce Macintosh of Stanford University and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.

The Gemini Planet Imager, billed as the "world's most powerful exoplanet camera" captured its first portrait of an exoplanet — a planet outside our solar system — shortly after it was installed on the Gemini South telescope in Chile in November.

"It was almost straight out of the box," said Konopacky, who used the data from the instrument to confirm the planet's distance from its star – about the same as the distance between the sun and Saturn.

The way the planet stands out from the background in the images "is basically unprecedented," she added.

Beta Pictoris b was first imaged in 2008, but previous images were "noisy" — that is, they were fuzzy the way analog TV images used to be if the signal wasn't good.

In comparison, the images from the Gemini Planet Imager are like high-definition TV where "everything just pops," Konopacky said.

The paper is "First light of the Gemini Planet Imager". All of it is available online, including the image.