Possible image of an exoplanet next to Beta Pictoris

Maybe the Very Large Telescope shoot a photography of an exoplanet around Beta Pictoris.

In french

If confirmed, this is great... the ~10 AU proposed planet around Beta Pictoris is one of the more secure planets inferred from dust discs, as there are several independent lines of evidence which suggest a planet should be there.

Guess we need to wait for orbital motion to be detected - fortunately the orbital period (probably in the range 20-30 years) is much shorter than the HR 8799 planets, and especially Fomalhaut b, though I'd guess if it is edge-on (like the disk) it will be harder to come up with a definitive orbit for the reason you would only see 1 dimension of the orbital motion.

For the non-Francophones among you, try this link (from which you can also get a copy of the paper in pdf format)

A Physorg article claims a distance of 8 AU. That can't be right? Exoplanet imaged around A-type star, 70 ly away from Earth, 8 AU from star? Lazarus said 10 AU. That's also close.

Projected separation is 411 milliarcseconds, which at Beta Pictoris's distance is 8 AU. The predicted semimajor axis from dust disc modelling is ~10 AU.

Wait... Bet Pic b is confirmed?

Oh my, its only a matter of time until the planet of Vega is found =D

Edasich wrote:Likely

Cool!. EPE shows it as confirmed, press release says "Possible image" and such. Still though, what else could it be? Right next to Beta Pictoris, and in line with the protoplanetary disk. It's got to be a planet. I would be immensely surprised if it turns out to be a background star.

Nuclear Vacuum wrote:Oh my, its only a matter of time until the planet of Vega is found =D

Bring it! Finally, all of these protoplanetary disk systems which have been suspected of hosting planets are now finally yielding confirmations. I've never seen a good image of the Vega disk, but the system is face-on, so I'm not sure what I should expect.

EPE lists Beta Pictoris b as having an orbital period of 16 days.



An 8 Jupiter-mass planet at 8 AU is inconsistent with the most recent model of the Beta Pictoris system disk morphology.

Planets of Beta Pictoris revisited
http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0701526

Florian Freistetter et al. wrote:Observations have revealed a large variety of structures (global asymmetries, warps, belts, rings) and dynamical phenomena ("falling-evaporating bodies" or FEBs, the "Beta Pic dust stream") in the disc of Beta Pictoris, most of which may indicate the presence of one or more planets orbiting the star. Because planets of Beta Pic have not been detected by observations yet, we use dynamical simulations to find "numerical evidence" for a planetary system. We show that already one planet at 12 AU with a mass of 2 to 5 Mjup and an eccentricity smaller or equal 0.1 can probably account for three major features (main warp, two inner belts, FEBs) observed in the Beta Pic disc. The existence of at least two additional planets at about 25 AU and 45 AU from the star seems likely. We find rather strong upper limits of 0.6 Mjup and 0.2 Mjup on the masses of those planets. The same planets could, in principle, also account for the outer rings observed at 500 - 800 AU.

Freistetter et al. claim a 2-5 M_j planet at 12 AU, 0.6 M_j planet at 25 AU, and 0.2 M_j planet at 45 AU. Could the 8 Jupiter-mass planet imaged here be the 2-5 M_j planet proposed by Freistetter et al? And if so, what might this mean for the other two possible planets in the system?


Also, an 8 Jupiter-mass planet orbiting a 1.8 Solar-mass star at 8 AU would produce a 60 m RV signal at 90 degrees inclination.

As for the planet being confirmed, I found this.

“We cannot yet rule out definitively, however, that the candidate companion could be a foreground or background object. To eliminate this very small possibility, we will need to make new observations that confirm the nature of the discovery.”

AFAIK, HST hasn't ever seen a background star near Beta Pictoris. But the best image I know of is this one,

in which the occulter would hide it anyway.

That would be nice, but I wouldn't count on it. The proposed masses of those other two seem pretty low.

Compared to a 8 M_j planet, how much does a sub-Jovian-mass planet heat up when it's formed?