Direct images of a Four Planet System in Orbit

The W.M. Keck observatory in Hawaii has obtained this incredible movie of four planets more massive than Jupiter orbiting the young star HR 8799, and although this animation does not show the full orbits, since it will take more years to collect, picture this, the inner planets will take 40 years to accomplish and the furthest more than 400 years, however the movie is quite remarkable. 

Researchers at the University of California at Berkeley think that the four planets may well be in resonance with each other. In this case it’s a one-two-four-eight resonance, meaning that each planet has an orbital period in nearly precise ratio with the others in the system.

In the image we can see a black circle in the centre, that is the light of star been blocked to be able to view the planets, these images were originally capture by Dr. Christian Marois of the National Research Council of Canada’s Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics, and the movie animation was put together by Jason Wang, an astronomy graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, who is part of the Berkeley arm of the Nexus for Exoplanet System Science (NExSS), a NASA-sponsored group formed to encourage interdisciplinary exoplanet science.

The star HR 8799 is 129 light years away in the constellation of Pegasus. By coincidence, it is quite close to the star 51 Pegasi, where the first exoplanet was detected in 1995, which is less than 60 million years old, Wang said, and is almost five times brighter than the sun. Quite incredible when one thinks that two decades ago we were still looking for evidence of the first exoplanet around another star. 

Sources: Many Worlds, NASA, NExSS, Wikipedia