Distant World in Peril Discovered from La Silla

EXO WORLDS

The presence of exoplanets in orbit around giant stars, some of which will eventually perish into their central star (be "cannibalized"), provides a possible explanation of the anomalous abundance of certain chemical elements that is observed in the atmospheres of some stars, cf. ESO PR 10/01.

London - Jan 24, 2003
When, in a distant future, the Sun begins to expand and evolves into a "giant" star, the surface temperature on the Earth will rise dramatically and our home planet will eventually be incinerated by that central body. Fortunately for us, this dramatic event is several billion years away.

However, that sad fate will befall another planet, just discovered in orbit about the giant star HD 47536, already within a few tens of millions of years. At a distance of nearly 400 light-years from us, it is the second-remotest planetary system discovered to date.

This is an interesting side-result of a major research project, now carried out by a European-Brazilian team of astronomers. In the course of a three-year spectroscopic survey, they have observed about 80 giant stars in the southern sky with the advanced FEROS spectrograph on the 1.52-m telescope installed at the ESO La Silla Observatory (Chile).

It is one of these stars that has just been found to host a giant planet. This is only the fourth such case known and with a diameter of about 33 million km (or 23.5 times that of our Sun), HD 47536 is by far the largest of those giant stars.

The distance of the planet from the star is still of the order of 300 million km (or twice the distance of the Earth from the Sun), a safe margin now, but this will not always be so. The orbital period is 712 days, i.e., somewhat less than two Earth years, and the planet's mass is 5 - 10 times that of Jupiter.

This interesting discovery bodes well for coming observations of exoplanetary systems with new, more powerful instruments, like HARPS to be installed next year at the ESO 3.6-m telescope on La Silla and also the Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI) at Paranal.

EXO WORLDS

Extrasolar Meteors Hint At Distant Planet Formation

Toronto - Jan 08, 2003
University of Toronto astronomers say that detecting microscopic meteors from other solar systems could provide clues about the formation of planets like Earth.

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