Astronomers See
New Planet's Shadow Cross A Distant Star
By Robert
Sanders, Public Affairs
Posted November 17, 1999
Astronomers have witnessed for the first time a distant planet passing in front of its star, providing direct and independent confirmation of the existence of extrasolar planets that to date have been inferred only from the wobble of their star.
"This is the first independent confirmation of a planet discovered through changes in a star's radial velocity and demonstrates that our indirect evidence for planets really is due to planets," said Geoffrey Marcy, professor of astronomy.
Marcy and his colleagues, Paul Butler of the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism at the Carnegie Institution of Washington in Washington, D.C., and Steve Vogt of UC Santa Cruz and Lick Observatory, first detected a wobble in the star called HD 209458 on Nov. 5. Ascribing the wobble to a nearby planet, they were able to estimate its orbit and approximate mass.
As with all new planets they detect, the team immediately brought it to the attention of collaborator Greg Henry, an astronomer at the Tennessee State University Center of Excellence in Information Systems in Nashville. He conducts research with several automatic telescopes at Fairborn Observatory, a non-profit research foundation located in the Patagonia Mountains of southern Arizona.
Henry turned one of his automatic telescopes on the star at the time Marcy and Butler predicted the planet would cross the face of the star if the planet's orbital plane were lucky enough to carry it between Earth and the star. Until now, none of the 18 other extrasolar planets Marcy and Butler have discovered has had its orbital plane oriented edge-on to Earth so that the planet could be seen to transit the star, nor have any of the other planets discovered by other researchers.
However, on Nov. 7, Henry observed a 1.7 percent dip in the star's brightness.
"This planetary transit occurred at exactly the time predicted from Marcy's observations, confirming absolutely the presence of a companion," Henry said. "The amount of dimming of the star's light during the transit also gives us the first-ever measure of the size and density of an extrasolar planet. We've essentially seen the shadow of the planet and used it to measure the planet's size."
The star HD 209458 is 153 light years or or 859,000 billion miles away in the constellation of Pegasus, and is about the same age, color and size as our own sun. It is very near the star, 51 Pegasi, around which the first extrasolar planet was discovered in 1995.
With the orbital plane of the planet known, the astronomers for the first time could determine precisely the mass of the planet and, from the size of the planet measured during transit, its density.
Interestingly, while the planet's mass is only 63 percent of Jupiter's mass, its radius is 60 percent bigger than that of Jupiter. This fits with theories that predict a bloated planet when, as here, the planet is very close to the star.
The density, about 0.2 grams per cubic centimeter, means it is a gas giant like Jupiter. However, such gas giants could not have formed at the distance this planet is from its star.
"This supports the theory that extrasolar planets very near their star did not form where they are, but formed farther out and migrated inward," Henry said.
Various groups around the world have been searching for planets by looking for dimming of stars, or as Marcy says, "staring at the sky and seeing if any star blinks." To date, none of these searches has turned up a new planet.
"With this one, everything hangs together," Marcy said. "This is what we've been waiting for."
November 17 - 23,
1999 (Volume 28, Number 15)
Copyright 1999, The Regents of the University of
California.
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