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Extraterrestrial Jupiter
Today astronomers announced the discovery of more than a dozen new planets orbiting distant stars. One of those planetary systems looks a bit like our own.
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June 13, 2002
After 15 years of looking, a top planet-hunting team has finally found a distant planetary system that reminds them of home.
Geoffrey Marcy, astronomy professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and astronomer Paul Butler of the Carnegie Institution of Washington today announced their discovery of a Jupiter-like planet orbiting a Sun-like star at nearly the same distance as the real Jupiter orbits our own Sun.
No one knows how the 55 Cnc system would look to the human eye, but space-artist Lynette Cook has imagined it. This digital painting shows, in the distance, the star with its two innermost planets. In the foreground is a hypothetical moon orbiting a Jupiter-like outer planet. [More]
Astronomers had found Jupiter-like planets around other stars before. But they were all very close to their parent suns (astronomers called the planets "hot Jupiters") and their orbits were elongated -- not circular. "This new planet orbits as far from its star as our own Jupiter orbits the Sun,'' said Marcy. That's what makes it interesting.
The star, 55 Cancri in the constellation Cancer, was already known to have one planet, announced by Butler and Marcy in 1996. That planet is a gas giant slightly smaller than the mass of Jupiter. It whips around the star in 14.6 days at a distance of only 0.1 AU. (AU means "astronomical unit." It's the distance between Earth and the Sun -- approximately 93-million miles. So, the first planet found in the 55 Cancri system is only one-tenth as far from its star as Earth is from the Sun.)
(Full Story Here)
Cheers,
Dan
Space/Science » in reply to A new exoplanet?
Extraterrestrial Jupiter [I would have written “Extrasolar Jupiter”] . . .