Animated video exoplanets rotating around its star

Video posted below - the first, which shows the rotation of exoplanets around its star. It is clear that this movie is not filmed on camera - is, rather, an animation sequence of a series of images obtained by an instrument Gemini Planet Imager. The tool is designed for a telescope Джемини South (Gemini South) , which was built in 2000, is located on Mount Grey Pachina (App. Cerro Pachón), 2700 meters above sea level in the Chilean Andes.

The pictures used in this video, the tool received from November 2013 to April 2015. It shows only a fragment of the path of a planet around the star, with the cycle of rotation is 22 years.

// player.vimeo.com/video/138973087 video>

Very low resolution images, respectively, and the video can not be called a super-quality. But this is, as mentioned above, the first of its kind video exoplanets rotating around its star. The planet itself - Beta Pictoris b, it is 10-12 times larger than Jupiter. Located whole planetary system 60 light years from Earth. If you go there with the speed of the probe New Horizons (at the moment is the fastest machine ever launched from Earth), it would take about a million years to reach this planetary system.

To all, the observation of exoplanets is still difficult because of one fact: the world does not shine by themselves, they reflect the light of its parent star. And the problem is that the luminosity of extrasolar planets many thousands of times lower than luminosity stars. Accordingly, the search for such objects are very hard, and even harder - to fix the found object on film. Nonetheless, scientists are working in this direction, and in the next three years, Gemini Planet Imager examine another 600 different stars.

Source: geektimes.ru/post/262762/