Bad Astronomer: First Image of a Planet Orbiting a Sunlike Star?

[pravnik]

I though this was pretty neat and wanted to pass it along. The Bad Astronomer posted on his Discover Online astronomy blog that astronomers may (or may not) have discovered and imaged a planet orbiting a star similar to our own. If it is a planet, it’s eleven times the distnace from its star that Neptune is to the Sun and eight times the mass of Jupiter. I propose naming it “Supiter.”

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2008/09/15/planet-imaged-around-a-sunlike-star/

[Colophon]

That is cool. Although I have a sneaking feeling it’ll turn out to be a star in the background.

[pravnik]

Yeah, more than likely it will. Still, pretty neat.

[USCDiver]

“Click to embiggen” snerk

[Malacandra]

I thought “Hmm…” and I’m pleased to see Phil addressed the important question:

@Himself

The most interesting thing about this is the distance of the purported planet from the star: 50 billion kilometers! That’s 11 times the distance Neptune is from the Sun. And that’s a lower limit; it might be farther. That makes me very suspicious: we don’t know of any way to form planets that far from their parent stars.

Stars and planets form from rotating disks of gas and dust. The stuff collects in the middle to form the star, and the stuff farther out forms the planets — we have seen many examples of this in the sky. The disks we see around new stars are big, sure, but by the time you get 50 billion km out they are very thin, and there’s just not enough material out there to form a planet, let alone one with 8 times the mass of Jupiter.

for which attention to a really significant detail I can even forgive letting slip a phrase like “The reason is because…” a couple of paragraphs earlier.

[Cisco]

Awesome! I’ll print this out and take it to astronomy class tonight.