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Astronomers have found a young cousin Jupiter
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51 Eridani b Artist's impression i>
Астрономы We discovered exoplanet , resembling Jupiter at a very early stage of formation - its age is about 20 million years. Planet 51 Eridanus b is located 100 light-years away in the constellation Eridanus.
20 million. Years - it's actually very little. It turns out that the dinosaurs became extinct on Earth for 45 million years before the beginning of its formation. Thanks to successful discovery, astronomers can learn the details of the formation of such planets - especially since this planet, unlike most other extrasolar planets, is available for direct observation.
Spectral analysis of the light reflected from it showed that its composition is similar to the composition of our gas giant Jupiter. But newborn planet twice it harder, and the radius of its orbit is 13 times greater than the radius of the orbit of Jupiter (somewhere between Saturn and Neptune).
Portrait of baby i>
The special joy of this discovery is the fact that it is - the first extrasolar planet, opening with a new tool, Gemini Planet Imager (GPI) . It is a tool to obtain high-contrast images, built on an 8-meter Chilean telescope. The project, launched in late 2014, is intended for direct observation of exoplanets, and uses adaptive optics for this.
"51 Eridani b - first young planet, looking about as Jupiter billions of years ago. This is a most important fragment of our knowledge of the puzzle, which describes the formation of the planets, - commented on the opening of Travis Barmen, a planetary scientist from the University of Arizona. - Since the time of the discovery of the first exoplanet, we were looking for methane, as it would indicate the presence of processes similar to those that occur in our gas giants. Find a methane-rich atmosphere using GPI so quickly - it was very inspiring. "
Source: geektimes.ru/post/260272/
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