By Leah Crane
Digitized Sky Survey 2; Acknowledgement: Davide De Martin and Mahdi Zamani
We might have the first image of the close-by exoplanet Proxima c, and it looks strange. It’s far brighter than astronomers anticipated, which may suggest that it’s surrounded by a substantial disk of dust or perhaps a shining system of rings.
Proxima Centauri is the closest star to the planetary system, at just 4.25 light-years away, and we understand that it has a world approximately the very same size as Earth called Proxima b. In 2019, astronomers identified an additional wiggle in the star’s movement that may be caused by the gravitational pull of a second, larger world called Proxima c.
Raffaele Gratton at the Astronomical Observatory of Padova in Italy and his colleagues utilized SPHERE, an instrument connected to the Large Telescope in Chile, to search for light reflected off Proxima c in hopes of taking the very first image of it.
Advertisement
” At the start I thought that there was little hope of seeing it, because we anticipated that the world would be too faint to be observed,” says Gratton. “However there appears to be some signal there, even if we are not totally sure that it is truly a planet.”
The observations had some sound in them, partly since of bad weather condition at the telescope, so the researchers needed to stack a number of images together to get their last image. The point of light that they found, which appears to be Proxima c, is brighter than expected.
A planet alone wouldn’t be huge enough to be so intense, so if the world exists it is most likely surrounded by a disk of particles or a huge set of rings that shows Proxima Centauri’s light. “It would look like Saturn, but overemphasized, with a bigger ring system and a smaller world,” says Gratton.
To reflect adequate light to discuss the brightness of the images, that disk or set of rings would have to be more than twice as wide as the intense part of Saturn’s ring system. “It needs to take up a lot of property to be brilliant enough,” says Mark Marley at NASA’s Ames Proving ground in California.
If Proxima c exists, its size and orbit suggest that it’s a relatively old world, and we’re not sure how such an old world would keep rings for a long period of time– on the other hand, Saturn’s rings are probably reasonably young at simply 100 million years of ages.
” I do not know of any theoretical reason it could not exist, however this would be a beast that we do not have anything like it in our solar system.” says Luke Dones at the Southwest Research Study Institute in Colorado. “If it ends up being real, it’ll be a really interesting puzzle to try to explain this.”
It will require more observations with a few of our best telescopes to figure out whether Proxima c and its massive disk really exist, but these SPHERE observations make that simpler by telling us exactly where around the star to look.
” Proxima c remains in theory totally observable at this moment, but the telescopes are closed due to the coronavirus,” states Gratton. “Possibly we will be able to observe it next year.”
Reference: arxiv.org/abs/200406685
Register to our free Launchpad newsletter for a voyage throughout the galaxy and beyond, every Friday
More on these subjects:
