by Four Jupiter-mass exoplanets dance around their parent star in a stunning new timelapse collected over a dozen years.
The goal of the newly released video is to make the long orbits of these massive exoplanets more recognizable to a wide audience, Northwestern University astrophysicist Jason Wang said in a statement. (opens in a new tab).
“This video shows planets moving in human time scale. I hope it will let people enjoy something wonderful,” Wang said. In real life, the planet closest to the star HR8799 takes 45 years to make a single circuit. The most distant world would take half a millennium (500 years) to circle the star once.
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HR8799 is 1.5 times more massive than our sun and lies about 133 light-years from Earth in the constellation Pegasus. (In comparison, the closest star system to us, Alpha Centauri, is just over 4 light years away.)
Although a little more massive than our sun, HR8799 is much brighter: it has five times the intrinsic luminosity of Earth’s departure. HR8799 is also very young at just 30 million years old, compared to our middle-aged sun, which is 4.5 billion years old.
HR8799 was the first star system to have its planets directly imaged, which was accomplished and announced in November 2008. The new timelapse uses images from the WM Keck Observatory atop Maunakea in Hawaii.
Keck has great advantages for astronomy: adaptive optics to compensate for the blurring effects of Earth’s atmosphere and a coronagraph that blocks light from the parent star, allowing reflected-light “fireflies” (planets) to shine through.
Wang and his colleagues created a timelapse after using seven years of periodic observations. The recently released timelapse is an updated version, with 12 years of observations from the time Wang’s team gained access to the telescope.
“There’s nothing to be gained scientifically from watching orbiting systems in time-lapse video, but it helps others appreciate what we’re studying,” Wang said. “It can be difficult to explain the nuances of science with words. But showing science in action helps others understand its importance.”
Elizabeth Howell is co-author of “Why am I taller (opens in a new tab)?” (ECW Press, 2022; with Canadian astronaut Dave Williams), a book on space medicine. Follow her on Twitter @howellspace (opens in a new tab). Follow us on twitter @Spacedotcom (opens in a new tab) or Facebook (opens in a new tab).
