It is most similar to Jupiter yet. Astronomers reported the discovery of a young planet, located 100 light years from Earth called 51 Eridani by having just about 20 million years (the solar system is about 4,500 million years)
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The findings, presented in the journal Science, is the first to be made with the Gemini Planet Imager, designed to detect and analyze young and faint planets around nearby bright stars
. 51 Eridani b is a million times fainter than the sun and shows the strongest signal the presence of methane ever detected an extrasolar planet, which provides ideas about how it was formed.
“It’s exactly the kind of planet we imagine when we designed the GPI “said James Graham, professor of astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley and project scientist. “We wanted to find young planets to decipher the process of formation.”
It is estimated that the planet has twice the mass of Jupiter and orbits at a distance of 13 astronomical units (one unit equals the distance Earth -Sol, about 150 million kilometers), roughly the distance of Saturn from the Sun.
In this star system where it was found inhabited by two other stars who apparently did not affect the orbit of 51 Eridani b.
The researchers also reported the presence of water on the planet’s composition, whose characteristics make it difficult to have life. It is gaseous
The GPI was installed in the Gemini telescope south Chile in 2013 and studied so far nearly 100 stars.
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