51 Pegasi - Planetary System

Planetary System

On October 6, 1995, Swiss astronomers Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz announced the discovery of an exoplanet orbiting 51 Pegasi. The discovery was made with the radial velocity method on a telescope at Observatoire de Haute-Provence in France and using the ELODIE spectrograph. On October 12, 1995, confirmation came from Dr. Geoffrey Marcy from San Francisco State University and Dr. Paul Butler from the University of California, Berkeley using the Hamilton Spectrograph at the Lick Observatory near San Jose in California.

51 Pegasi b (51 Peg b) is the first discovered planetary-mass companion of its parent star. The planet has been informally named Bellerophon. After its discovery, many teams confirmed its existence and obtained more observations of its properties, including the fact that it orbits very close to the star, suffers estimated temperatures around 1200°C, and has a minimum mass about half that of Jupiter. At the time, this close distance was not compatible with theories of planet formation and resulted in discussions of planetary migration. It has been assumed that the planet shares the star's inclination of 79 degrees. But several "hot Jupiters" are known to be oblique relative to the stellar axis. As of 2012, no additional planets have been found orbiting this star.

The 51 Pegasi system
Companion
Mass Semimajor axis
Orbital period
Eccentricity Radius
b ≥ 0.472 ± 0.039 MJ 0.0527 ± 0.0030 4.230785 ± 0.000036 0.013 ± 0.012

Read more about this topic:  51 Pegasi

Famous quotes containing the words planetary and/or system:

    What is a television apparatus to man, who has only to shut his eyes to see the most inaccessible regions of the seen and the never seen, who has only to imagine in order to pierce through walls and cause all the planetary Baghdads of his dreams to rise from the dust.
    Salvador Dali (1904–1989)

    Human beings are compelled to live within a lie, but they can be compelled to do so only because they are in fact capable of living in this way. Therefore not only does the system alienate humanity, but at the same time alienated humanity supports this system as its own involuntary masterplan, as a degenerate image of its own degeneration, as a record of people’s own failure as individuals.
    Václav Havel (b. 1936)