Mystery Monday…
By Robert Roy Britt
Senior Science Writer
posted: 07:00 am ET
10 May 2004
BALTIMORE – In a preliminary analysis of new data, astronomers say they may have imaged a planet outside our solar system for the first time by using a tricky new method to ferret out dim objects from the light of a star.
The researchers are very cautious not to claim any discovery yet. The faint point of light, captured by the Hubble Space Telescope, might instead be a background star or a very distant galaxy and requires follow-up observations to be confirmed.
The scientists say there is a high probability the object is a planet, however. If so, it would not resemble anything in our solar system.
The possible planet is huge, something less than 10 times as massive as Jupiter. It orbits a white dwarf star, which is dramatically different from our Sun. White dwarfs are burnt out corpses of formerly massive stars.
Three candidates
The object is one of three planet candidates found in the new study around white dwarf stars between 30 and 55 light-years away. The other two candidates appear to be even more massive, about 15-20 times as heavy as Jupiter. That would put them at the boundary between massive planets and failed stars known as brown Dwarf. Stellar pairs and even triplets are common, so astronomers would not be surprised to find a brown dwarf circling a white dwarf.
Each of the newly spotted objects and its corresponding white dwarf are separated by more than the distance from Neptune to the Sun.
HOW IT’S DONE: A raw infrared image of a white dwarf star from Hubble shows a lot of noise, rather than isolating the star as a point of light.
After rotating Hubble and taking a second image, then processing the two photos to reduce noise, the star’s influence is reduced, making it possible in theory to spot dim brown dwarfs and very massive planets.
This is one of the three new processed observations showing a point of light (in the upper right) that may be a planet or brown dwarf. An additional observation a few months from now is needed to show whether the object moves with the white dwarf and is therefore a companion, or if it is a background object moving at a different pace.
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