Working for an The Extreme Solar System conference at Santorini is off with a bang!
Number of announcements already in the first session, I'll catch up on the highlights later, and just give the, in my opinion, most interesting.
The California-Carnegie-AAT group has a genuine extrasolar Jupiter analog!
Jason Wright announced it in the first session.
It is one of several systems that have been monitored for ~ decade and been known to show a long term trend in velocity.
The velocity variation peaked a few years ago, but had not shown a full cycle, so the orbit was poorly constrained. The second turn just came recently and the orbital solution has collapsed to a quite robust fit, this one is real I think.
System is HD154345 - a G8V main sequence dwarf.
About 0.9 solar masses, slightly sub-solar metallicity ( [Fe/H] = -0.1), at a distance of 18 pc
The planet has projected (m sin(i)) mass of 1 Jupiter mass, in a 10 year orbital period, at about 4.4 AU from the star, with an eccentricity of only 0.07 +- little bit.
This is a Jupiter - a cold gaseous giant planet in the right place, which does not look to have migrated or done anything messy.
It is of course a fabulous target for low mass rocky planets interior to the current known giant, including in the habitable zone.
It is also a very promising indicator that the large number of known "trending" systems being monitored will resolve out to be solar system analogs - maybe 20-30% of stars being monitored may be solar system like if this all pans out - but that is speculative at this stage.
Really wonderful discovery and announcement. Paper is on its way soon I gather.
Comments
Hmm, 0.24" separation, then? Looks like all the extreme imagers have their first target.
Posted by: JohnD | June 26, 2007 10:25 AM
Cool!!! When can we go?
Posted by: Kea | June 26, 2007 10:21 PM
yup, it is a good target - bit far to visit yet, I think we will have better candidates closer, soon... real soon.
Posted by: Steinn Sigurdsson | June 27, 2007 4:17 AM