Astronomers view a Jupiter-like exoplanet from AF Hare. This has been reported by the European Southern Observatory (ESO).
The observations were made by two independent teams led by Dino Mesa and Robert De Rosa using the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile. This observatory consists of four 8.2-metre main telescopes and four 1.8-metre auxiliary telescopes that can work as a whole. Initially, signs of the existence of this planet were discovered by analyzing the minor oscillations of the parent star AF Hare caused by gravitational interactions.
That’s why astronomers decided to observe the star using the VLT. The SPHERE system built on it, on the one hand, turns off the light of a star and allows to see a dimmer planet, on the other hand, it suppresses the disturbances brought by the atmosphere with the help of adaptive optics. As a result, they managed to get an image of a planet several times larger than Jupiter.
The AF Hare star has approximately the same mass, size and temperature as the Sun, but is 200 times younger (24 million years old). The discovered planet orbits the star at a distance similar to the distance between Saturn and the Sun.
Astronomers hope that further observations will provide a better understanding of how the solar system formed.