Possible New Exoplanet Around GQ Lupi |
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Written by spacetravel.org
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Saturday, 02 July 2005 17:55 |
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Ralph Neuhaüser and his team at the University of Jena, Germany found a very faint companion of the star GQ Lupi when studying multiple images of GQ Lupi taken from April 1999 to September 2004 by the Hubble Space Telescope, the 8.2-meter Subaru telescope, and Yepun, one of the four 8.2-meter reflectors making up ESOs Very Large Telescope. The companion shares GQ Lupis proper motion across the sky, which shows that the two objects are gravitationally bound. GQ Lupi is a T Tauri protostar that is still accreting material from a disk. It is about 450 light-years from Earth.
Estimates of the companions mass range between 1 and 42 Jupiters. This means that it could either be a planet or a brown dwarf. It orbits GQ Lupi at about 100 times the distance between the Earth and the Sun. Its orbital period is about 1,200 years. Because it is so far apart from its host star, astronomers can only estimate its mass based on its temperature of about 2,050°, which was calculated based on water and carbon monoxide absorption spectra, GQ Lupis approximate age of one million years, and theoretical models of how low-mass objects are expected to cool with age. Astronomers are not able to measure the objects mass directly, because it is too far from GQ Lupi to tell how much it tugs on the star.
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