Hubble Space Telescope Observes a Planet Orbiting Another Star!

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has taken the first visible-light snapshot of a planet circling another star.

Estimated to be no more than three times Jupiter's mass, the planet,
called Fomalhaut b, orbits the bright southern star Fomalhaut, located
25 light-years away in the constellation Piscis Australis, or the
"Southern Fish."

Fomalhaut has been a candidate for planet hunting ever since an excess
of dust was discovered around the star in the early 1980s by NASA's
Infrared Astronomy Satellite, IRAS.

In 2004, the coronagraph in the High Resolution Camera on Hubble's
Advanced Camera for Surveys produced the first-ever resolved
visible-light image of the region around Fomalhaut. It clearly showed a
ring of protoplanetary debris approximately 21.5 billion miles across
and having a sharp inner edge.

This large debris disk is similar to the Kuiper Belt, which encircles
the solar system and contains a range of icy bodies from dust grains to
objects the size of dwarf planets, such as Pluto.

Hubble astronomer Paul Kalas, of the University of California at
Berkeley, and team members proposed in 2005 that the ring was being
gravitationally modified by a planet lying between the star and the
ring's inner edge.

Circumstantial evidence came from Hubble's confirmation that the ring
is offset from the center of the star. The sharp inner edge of the ring
is also consistent with the presence of a planet that gravitationally
"shepherds" ring particles. Independent researchers have subsequently
reached similar conclusions.

Now, Hubble has actually photographed a point source of light lying 1.8
billion miles inside the ring's inner edge. The results are being
reported in the November 14 issue of Science magazine.

"Our Hubble observations were incredibly demanding. Fomalhaut b is 1
billion times fainter than the star. We began this program in 2001, and
our persistence finally paid off," Kalas says.

"Fomalhaut is the gift that keeps on giving. Following the unexpected
discovery of its dust ring, we have now found an exoplanet at a
location suggested by analysis of the dust ring's shape. The lesson for
exoplanet hunters is 'follow the dust,'" said team member Mark Clampin
of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

Observations taken 21 months apart by Hubble's Advanced Camera for
Surveys' coronagraph show that the object is moving along a path around
the star, and is therefore gravitationally bound to it. The planet is
10.7 billion miles from the star, or about 10 times the distance of the
planet Saturn from our sun.

The planet is brighter than expected for an object of three Jupiter
masses. One possibility is that it has a Saturn-like ring of ice and
dust reflecting starlight. The ring might eventually coalesce to form
moons. The ring's estimated size is comparable to the region around
Jupiter and its four largest orbiting satellites.

Kalas and his team first used Hubble to photograph Fomalhaut in 2004,
and made the unexpected discovery of its debris disk, which scatters
Fomalhaut's starlight. At the time they noted a few bright sources in
the image as planet candidates. A follow-up image in 2006 showed that
one of the objects is moving through space with Fomalhaut but changed
position relative to the ring since the 2004 exposure. The amount of
displacement between the two exposures corresponds to an 872-year-long
orbit as calculated from Kepler's laws of planetary motion.

Future observations will attempt to see the planet in infrared light
and will look for evidence of water vapor clouds in the atmosphere.
This would yield clues to the evolution of a comparatively newborn
100-million-year-old planet. Astrometric measurements of the planet's
orbit will provide enough precision to yield an accurate mass.

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, scheduled to launch in 2013 will be
able to make coronagraphic observations of Fomalhaut in the near- and
mid-infrared. Webb will be able to hunt for other planets in the system
and probe the region interior to the dust ring for structures such as
an inner asteroid belt.


J.D. Harrington
NASA Headquarters

Ray Villard
Space Telescope Science Institute