January 7, 2014 - Universe Today
The world’s newest and most powerful exoplanet imaging instrument, the recently-installed Gemini Planet Imager (GPI) on the 8-meter Gemini South telescope, has captured its first-light infrared image of an exoplanet: Beta Pictoris b
,
which orbits the star Beta Pictoris, the second-brightest star in the
southern constellation Pictor. The planet is pretty obvious in the image
above as a bright clump of pixels just to the lower right of the star
in the middle (which is physically covered by a small opaque disk to
block glare.) But that cluster of pixels is really a distant planet 63
light-years away and several times more massive — as well as 60% larger —
than Jupiter!