Today, searching for exoplanets is one of the most exciting and challenging tasks in astronomy, and thanks to the new SPHERE receiver, specifically designed to search for extrasolar worlds, planet HIP 65426b has been discovered about 385 light-years from Earth.
It is quite hot on its surface, from 1000 to 1400 degrees Celsius, and it exceeds Jupiter in mass by 6-12 times. Apparently, HIP 65426b has a very dusty atmosphere with a thick cloud layer.
Her mother star is hot, young, and spinning unusually fast. It is strange that, despite its youth, the star is not surrounded by a residual disk of protostellar matter, while it is completely incomprehensible how, in the absence of such a disk, a planet could have formed near the star.
An image of the unusual exoplanet HIP 65426b taken with the SPHERE receiver. Credit: ESO
Scientists suggest that the exoplanet could have been born from a gas and dust disk, which quickly scattered, and then, interacting with other planets of this system, moved into a more distant orbit, where it is now. There is another option: the star and the planet formed simultaneously in the form of a binary system, and its more massive stellar component did not allow its partner to gain enough mass to also become a star. The discovery will allow astronomers to study the composition and localization of clouds in the planet's atmosphere, as well as test theories of formation, evolution and physics of exoplanets.
The SPHERE receiver is a powerful tool for finding extrasolar planets mounted on ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT). His scientific task is to register and study giant exoplanets near nearby stars using direct images. This task is very difficult, since the bright light of the mother star does not allow distinguishing the very faint reflected glow of the planet next to it. The SPHERE receiver cleverly avoids this difficulty: observations are carried out in polarized light, which appears when the star's radiation is reflected from the planet's surface.
SPHERE receiver on an optical bench. Credit: ESO
The image of HIP 65426b was obtained as part of the SHINE survey program, during which it is planned to obtain images of 600 young stars close to the Sun in the near infrared region with the SPHERE instrument in order to discover and study new planetary systems and study the conditions of their formation.
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Roman Zakharov