An Exo- Jupiter Unveiled

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.

Tags

More like this

More planet news from the Extreme Solar Systems conference In addition to the Jupier like planet (did I mention that I like that result...?) the California-Carnegie-AAT team has several more long period jovians, possibly with low eccentricity orbits. Looking at known planet hosts, 179 stars, 25 are…
High mass planets around metal poor red dwarfs, may put small crack in big theory New planets just put up on exoplanet.eu - from JJ of the California-Carnegie-AAT group. These were mentioned at Santorini, but I don't think I talked specifically about them at the time, not sure if I failed to note…
There have been several interesting items at the Extreme Solar Systems conference here in Santorini I think the surprise announcement from the California exoplanets groups that they have a genuine Jupiter analog - a Jupiter mass planet in a long period, low eccentricity orbit, very similar to our…
30 new planets reported at "Towards Other Earths" Porto conference. Some of them are rather interesting. The Extrasolar Planet Encyclopaedia reported 30 new planets reported by 7 different teams at the Towards Other Earths conference in Porto - wish I could have been there, too many meetings…