WASHINGTON: An international team of astronomers says it has managed to take the first direct visible-light spectrum from an exoplanet, providing a new tool to probe the nature of the “hot Jupiter” known as 51 Pegasi b.
The findings, published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, offers a promising way forward to study exoplanets that doesn’t rely on waiting for a distant planet to transit, or pass in front of its host star.
“I was really happy. It was awesome … especially when I started looking at the implications of it,” said lead author Jorge Martins, an astronomer at the University of Porto in Portugal working on his PhD while at the European Southern Observatory in Chile, known as ESO. “It’s like, we’re observing a planet that is at a distance of like 3 million times the distance of the Earth to the sun, and we’re still able to see the reflected light of the planet. I don’t know. I think it’s overwhelming.”
51 Pegasi b has long been known as the first confirmed discovery of a planet around a sun-like star. The planet, whose star sits about 50 light-years away in the constellation Pegasus, was found in 1995 and is seen as a typical “hot Jupiter” — the kind of gassy heavyweight planet that is in the same size class as Jupiter but that orbits extremely close to its home star.
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