NEWS NOTES

First image of a young sun and two giant planets

THE EUROPEAN Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) has captured an image of a young, Sun-like star and its two companions. Direct images of exoplanets are nothing new, but this is the first time researchers have directly seen multiple planets orbiting a star like our own.

The star is only 17 million years old, a “very young version of our own Sun,” says Alexander Bohn (Leiden University, The Netherlands), who led the team that reported the results.

But the system, dubbed TYC 8998-760-1, is nothing like our Solar System. One of the star’s companions straddles the line that defines planets, with a mass 14 times Jupiter’s; the other has a mass of six Jupiters. Both orbit far from the star, about 160 and 320 times the average distance between Earth and the Sun. That puts them more than four times farther out than Pluto is from the Sun.

The SPHERE instrument on the VLT blocks the host star using a coronagraph, then uses a technique called polarimetery to further separate the starlight from the light coming from the planets. SPHERE images infrared radiation, so the light