View Single Post
  #5  
Old January 3rd 18, 09:42 AM posted to sci.astro.research
Steve Willner
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 1,172
Default Discovery of non-transiting exo planets possible?

In article ,
[[Mod. note --
1. No, the planets in our solar system do NOT orbit in the plane of
our galaxy.


Indeed: the Galactic latitude of the north ecliptic pole is about
29.8 deg. It would be 90 deg if the two planes were aligned.

2. The author is correct that directly imaging an extrasolar planet
requires a HUGE dynamic range. To this end, attempts to do this
generally include a coronagraph to block almost all of the host
star's light. There's a bit of discussion of coronagraph designs
in Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronagraph
Even with a coronagraph, scattered light from the host star is
still the #1 problem in direct detection of extrasolar planets.
-- jt]]


Nevertheless, planets have been directly detected in a few systems.
I _think_ the first was beta Pictoris (Lagrange et al. 2010):
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/329/5987/57.full

HR 8799 shows three planets (Marois et al. 2010):
http://www.nature.com/articles/nature09684

There are other examples; those are just two I happened to find.

A recent article by Meshkat et al. (2017)
http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10...81/aa8e9a/meta
reports a systematic but unsuccessful search of stars known to have
debris disks. Their Introduction gives references to prior
successful imaging studies.

--
Help keep our newsgroup healthy; please don't feed the trolls.
Steve Willner Phone 617-495-7123
Cambridge, MA 02138 USA