November 13, 2008 - NSF
Astronomers using the Gemini North telescope and W.M. Keck Observatory on Hawaii's Mauna Kea, the tallest mountain in the Hawaiian chain, have obtained the first-ever direct images identifying a multi-planet system around a normal star.
The Gemini images allowed the international team to make the initial discovery of two of the planets in the confirmed planetary system with data obtained on Oct. 17, 2007. Then, on Oct. 25, 2007, and in the summer of 2008, the team, led by Christian Marois of the National Research Council of Canada's Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics in Victoria, British Columbia, and members from the U.S. and U.K., confirmed this discovery and found a third planet orbiting even closer to the star with images obtained by the Keck II telescope. These historic infrared images of an extra-solar multiple-planet system were made possible by adaptive optics technology used to correct in real time for atmospheric turbulence, the shimmering or blinking of starlight as it passes through the earth's atmosphere.
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