It is also relatively nearby, just over 63 light years, and surrounded by a disk of stellar dust.
Business
Standard : A second planet has been discovered circling Beta
Pictoris, a fledgling star in our own galaxy offering astronomers
a rare glimpse of a planetary system in the making, according to a
study published Monday.
"We
talking about a giant planet about 3,000 times more massive than
Earth, situated 2.7 times further from its star than the Earth is
from the Sun," said Anne-Marie Lagrange, an astronomer at
France's National Centre for Scientific Research and lead author of a
study in Nature Astronomy.
The
new
planet, b Pictoris c, completes its orbit roughly every 1,200
days. Like its big sister b Pictoris b, discovered by Lagrange and
her team in 2009, it is a gassy giant.
Visible
with the naked eye, Beta Pictoris -- with a mass nearly twice that of
the Sun -- is a newborn by comparison: only 23 million years old.
The
Sun is more than 4.5 billion years old.
It
is also relatively nearby, just over 63 light years, and surrounded
by a disk of stellar dust.
This
swirling halo of debris and gas was the first such configuration to
be captured in image, making Beta Pictoris a celebrity star in the
1980s.
"To
better understand the early stage of formation and evolution, this is
probably the best planetary system we know of," Lagrange told
AFP.
Observations
show that the two planets are still taking shape.
B
Pictoris c was discovered by analysing 10-years worth of
high-resolution data obtained with instruments at the La Silla
Observatory in northern Chile, run by the intergovernmental European
Southern Observatory.
In
2014, scientists said b Pictoris b spins at a breakneck speed of some
25 kilometres per second (90,000 kph or 56,000 miles per hour).
Located
in the southern constellation of Pictor -- "The Painter's Easel"
-- Beta Pictoris is the second brightest star in its constellation.
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