An American astrophysicist has released the longest video of multiple exoplanets orbiting a star. In the film, the movements of the four exoplanets in the HR 8799 system, recorded over a period of 12 years, are summarized in a few seconds and thus extremely accelerated. That’s how they become comprehensible, says Northwestern University’s Jason Wang: “This video shows the movement of planets on a human timescale, I hope people can enjoy something this great.” Research can’t gain anything from the video, but it can help others to understand the work: “That’s the fun part of science.”
HR 8799 is a star about 130 light years away, in 2008 and 2009 not only four exoplanets were discovered there. An image of the system released in November 2008 is the first ever of a multi-planet system. Wang has been fascinated by the star and his companions ever since, his university writes. With the Keck Observatory, he took new pictures every year and put them together in the most recent video. It covers a total of 12 years and consists of 10 individual recordings. There had previously been a video that summarized the movement from seven years.
All four of HR 8799’s exoplanets are significantly more massive than Jupiter, at seven to ten times the mass of the largest planet in the solar system. It will take some time before there is a complete video that shows a complete orbit around the star for all four. The innermost needs 57 Earth years for an orbit, the others 101, 189 and even 465 Earth years. Wang owes the fact that direct images of the exoplanets are possible to a technique called “adaptive optics”. This compensates for distortions caused by the earth’s atmosphere. In addition, the immensely bright light of the star itself has to be blocked out with a coronagraph, HR 8799 can even be seen with the naked eye in the constellation Pegasus. Intermediate frames were also calculated for the video in order to make the movements of the points more even.
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