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We now know of over 5,000 exoplanets, worlds orbiting other stars. The vast majority of those were discovered via the transit method, where the planet causes a mini-eclipse and blocks a little bit of its host star’s light. This is an indirect method; we don’t see the planet itself, just the effect it has on its star’s light.
As of right now, fewer than 60 exoplanets have been directly imaged; that is, seen in actual images taken of their star. This method works best looking in infrared light with young stars — newly formed planets glow in IR due to their own heat, while stars tend not to emit as much infrared, making the planets easier to spot. This also works best for planets that are pretty far from their star — 50-300 times farther out than Earth is from the Sun — so they aren’t lost in the glare.
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With that in mind, a team of astronomers used the huge Subaru telescope in Hawaii and Hubble Space Telescope to look for any possible still-forming planets, called protoplanets, orbiting AB Aurigae.
And it looks like they found one.
A bright spot is seen a small distance away from the star, roughly 90 times the Earth-Sun distance, or about 14 billion kilometers out — a bit over twice as far as Pluto from the Sun. It’s outside the main disk of gas but inside the dust ring.
AB Aur moves slowly in our sky relative to more distant objects, and if this spot were a background star or galaxy it would be at a very different position in the images after 15 years. It was seen in infrared observations taken by Hubble in 2007, and is still in nearly the same position relative to the star in new observations. It’s also seen in images taken with the Subaru telescope, so it’s not due to some telescope or processing artifact. It’s real, and it moves along with the star.
FoundingFrog
Article URL : https://www.syfy.com/syfy-wire/bad-astronomy-theorized-exoplanet-ab-aurigae-b-directly-seen-in-photos