The American Astronomical Society’s 205th national meeting, in San Diego, California, ends tomorrow. And this meeting is special: the last attendance projection Centauri Dreams saw was 2500, with 1640 papers submitted, 180 scientific sessions, and 70 new Ph.D dissertations presented. All in all, we’ll have material for months ahead coming out of AAS, and as always, we’ll pay special attention to extrasolar planetary studies, with the occasional foray into the mind-boggling world of cosmology.
Let’s start with Hubble data that support the idea there is a planet orbiting a brown dwarf 225 light years away in the constellation Hydra. Last spring, the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope reported on a possible planetary companion to the star, which has the mind-boggling designation 2MASSWJ 1207334-393254 (we prefer its nickname: 2M1207). The object in question is one-hundredth the brightness of the parent star, burning (according to this news release at the European homepage for Hubble) “…at barely 1000 degrees Celsius, which is cooler than a light bulb filament.”
The University of Arizona’s Glenn Schneider presented this work at AAS. From the news release:
“The NICMOS [Hubble’s Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer] photometry supports the conjecture that the planet candidate is about five times the mass of Jupiter if it indeed orbits the brown dwarf,” says Glenn Schneider of the University of Arizona, USA. “The NICMOS position measurements, relative to VLT’s, indicate the object is a true (and thus orbiting) companion at a 99 percent level of confidence – but further planned Hubble observations are required to eliminate the 1 percent chance that it is a coincidental background object which is not orbiting the dwarf.”
Probable age of the object: approximately 8 million years, based on its position within the TW Hydrae stars, all of which are estimated to be about this old. Distance from the primary: 8 billion kilometers (4.97 million miles), 30 percent farther than Pluto from the Sun. It would take 2500 years for this planet to circle its star.
