Four Jupiter-mass exoplanets dance around their parent stars in a stunning new timelapse collected over 12 years.
Newly released video aims to make long orbits of these giant planets exoplanet Jason Wang, an astrophysicist at Northwestern University, said it would be more recognizable to a wider audience. statement (opens in new tab).
“This video shows the planet moving on a human timescale, and I hope people will be able to enjoy something great,” Wang said.In real life, the closest planet is star HR8799 takes 45 years to make one revolution. The farthest world takes five hundred years (500 years) to orbit her once around the star.
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The HR8799 weighs 1.5 times as much as us. Sun It is about 133 light years away from . earth in the constellation Pegasus. (By comparison, the closest star system to us is Alpha Centauri, just over 4 light years away. )
HR8799 is a little more massive than our Sun, but much brighter, with an intrinsic brightness five times that of Earth’s beginnings. HR8799 is also very young at only 30 million years old compared to our mid-life Sun, which is 4.5 billion years old.
HR8799 was completed in November 2008 and was the first star system to photograph a planet directly and announced. The new timelapse WM Keck Observatory Mauna Kea summit in Hawaii.
Keck has great advantages. astronomy: adaptive optics to compensate for the blurring effect of Earth’s atmosphere,and coronagraph It blocks the light from the parent star and allows the reflected light “firefly” (planet) to show through.
Wang and his colleagues created a single timelapse after using seven years of periodic observations. The newly released Timelapse is an updated version that includes 12 years of his observations from when Wang’s team got access to the telescope.
“There is nothing scientifically to be gained from looking at orbiting systems in time-lapse videos, but it will help others appreciate what we are researching,” said Wang. “It can be difficult to describe the nuances of science in words, but demonstrating science in action helps others understand its importance.”
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