A few weeks ago, The European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT) captured a groundbreaking image. For the first time ever, we can see not one, but two exoplanets orbiting a star similar to our Sun.
The image was taken by SPHERE (Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast Exoplanet REsearch instrument). It’s an instrument installed on VLT’s Unit Telescope 3 and designed particularly to search for exoplanets. This is the first direct image of a planetary system around a star like our Sun. ESO writes that the system is located about 300 light-years away from us, and it’s known as TYC 8998-760-1.
“This discovery is a snapshot of an environment that is very similar to our Solar System, but at a much earlier stage of its evolution,” explains Alexander Bohn, a PhD student at Leiden University in the Netherlands. In other words, it’s something like a younger version of our Sun. Matthew Kenworthy, Associate Professor at Leiden University says that astronomers have indirectly detected thousands of planets in our galaxy. However, “only a tiny fraction of these exoplanets have been directly imaged,” he adds. In a blog post, ESO writes more about the planets and the star that they orbit: Further observations of this system will enable astronomers to test whether these planets formed at their current location distant from the star or migrated from elsewhere. It will also help them understand how planets formed and evolved around our own Sun. If you’d like to read more about this discovery, make sure to visit ESO’s website. [via DPReview]
