ESO VLT Captures Image of gaseous Exoplanet

This image from ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT) shows the newly discovered planet HD95086 b, next to its parent star. Image released June 3, 2013.

CREDIT: ESO/J. Rameau

A newly discovered gaseous planet has been directly photographed orbiting a star about 300 light-years from Earth.

Imaging alien planets is difficult, and this world may be the least massive planet directly observed outside of the solar system, scientists say.

A sharp new photo released by the European Southern Observatory (ESO) today (June 3) depicts the suspected gas giant (called HD 95086 b) circling its young star (named HD 95086) in infrared light.

The star has been removed from the image to allow the planet — shown as a bright blue dot at the bottom left of the picture — to shine through.

HD 95086 b was sighted by ESO's Very Large Telescope in Chile. Based on the planet's brightness, scientists estimate that it is only about four or five times more massive than Jupiter.

Most exoplanets are discovered via indirect means, such as detecting a dip in a star's light when a planet passes in front of it, blocking part of its face, or finding a slight wobble in a star's movement caused by the gravitational tug of planets orbiting it.

"Direct imaging of planets is an extremely challenging technique that requires the most advanced instruments, whether ground-based or in space," Julien Rameau, an astronomer at the Institute of Astrophysics and Planetology in Grenoble, France and lead author of the study announcing the discovery, said in a statement.

"Only a few planets have been directly observed so far, making every single discovery an important milestone on the road to understanding giant planets and how they form."

Another photo from ESO shows the star and its planet in context with other stars in the southern constellation of Carina, the keel.

The planet orbits its star at about twice the distance from the sun to Neptune and about 56 times the distance between Earth and the sun. The blue circle in the photo represents the distance between the sun and Neptune.

This picture shows the sky around the young star HD 95086 in the southern constellation of Carina (The Keel). 

It was created from images from the Digitized Sky Survey 2.

CREDIT: ESO/Digitized Sky Survey 2. Acknowledgement: Davide De Martin

New Stars surrounded by Protoplanetary Gaseous Disks

Many newly formed stars are surrounded by what are called protoplanetary disks, swirling masses of warm dust and gas that can constitute the core of a developing solar system.

Proof of the existence of such disks didn't come until 1994, when the Hubble telescope examined young stars in the Orion Nebula.

Protoplanetary disks may potentially become celestial bodies such as planets and asteroids but just how they make that transformation will remain a mystery to science until researchers can get a grasp on the disordered movement, or turbulence, that characterizes the constituent gases of the disks.

Turbulence is what some people regard as "the last great classical physics problem."

"By understanding the nature of the gases, we can learn something about how small particles interact with each other, coagulate to become larger particles and then ultimately form planets," says Jake Simon of the University of Colorado, principal investigator of a research project currently taking on two primary challenges in the quest to understand protoplanetary disk turbulence.

"In a particular region in these disks, the electrons are tied to magnetic fields, while the ions are not. This leads to something called the Hall effect and currently, our numerical algorithms cannot accurately capture the nature of this effect," he says.

Edwin Hall

Discovered by American physicist Edwin Hall in 1879, the Hall effect refers to a voltage-difference that occurs across an electrical conductor.

The voltage difference is crossways to an electrical current in the conductor and a magnetic field that is perpendicular to the current.

"If the ions and electrons don't collide with the neutrals frequently enough, ambipolar diffusion acts to damp out the turbulence," he says.

"The degree to which this happens has been explored with our high-resolution numerical simulations that we have run on the Kraken supercomputer. We believe we now have a much better understanding of how disks behave in their outer regions, far from the central star."

KRAKEN SuperComputer


The National Science Foundation's Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) has provided the compute time allocation for the project on Kraken, one of the most powerful supercomputers in academia.

Kraken is housed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and managed by the University of Tennessee's National Institute for Computational Sciences.

Read more about Stellar Chemistry here: Stellar Chemistry

Big Bang Aftermath: From Darkness to Light

An international team of scientists has found a clue as to what happened in the universe after the Big Bang.

They claim that just after the big bang, a dense hydrogen fog that was seen across the universe was completely burned off in some isolated, low-density regions of the universe.

A few hundred million years later, reionisation took place in the dense, crowded regions of the universe.

Previously, astronomers claimed that just after big bang, a dense hydrogen "fog" settled over the universe. During this time, a lot of the light produced by the first stars could only travel short distances before it was absorbed by the fog.

They call this period the "dark ages" of the universe, but little is known about what was happening at this time.

Now scientists have found that hydrogen fog was burned off first in isolated, low-density regions of the universe. They also found that galaxies in crowded regions of the universe were more likely to be shrouded in very dense pockets of hydrogen fog.

Such dense regions would therefore require larger numbers of light sources and more time to burn off the fog compared to regions with relatively light fog.

Scientists discovered this when they studied several reionisations that took place around three galaxies, including the Milky Way.

"We used nearby galaxies to understand something that happened long ago, in much the same way fossils are used to understand earth's history," said Duncan Forbes, professor at the Swinburne University of Technology.

"We can see regions around galaxies where reionisation has just finished and use that information to understand important questions about the dark ages: What were the first stars like; how were the first galaxies formed; and were there many supermassive black holes," he added.

"Understanding how reionisation moved through the universe is very challenging but of enormous importance in astronomy.

Our technique provides a novel way to tackle this problem," said Dr Lee Spitler, astrophysicist at the Swinburne University of Technology, in a statement.

Scientists claim that further studies will help them understand more about the dark ages and the evolution of the universe.