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| Science News Release | |
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| SNR 15-2003 | |
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| European astronomers' wish granted by GENIE 11 September 2003 Europe's premier planet-hunting team has given ESA scientists and their colleagues at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) a new prize to chase: a planet whose entire year lasts just two and a half days. The Jupiter-sized world is perfectly placed for study using ESA/ESO's forthcoming GENIE instrument and could provide the first direct look at a planet around another star. The Ground-based European Nulling Interferometer Experiment (GENIE) is a collaboration between ESA and ESO. It plans to turn ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT) into a working model of ESA's planned Earth-like world finder, Darwin. Nulling interferometry allows bright stars to be filtered out, leaving fainter surrounding objects visible. GENIE will allow the detection and study of a number of celestial objects; among them, the dust clouds that are expected to surround other planetary systems and failed stars, known as 'brown dwarfs'. However, although its space-based cousin Darwin will be able to clearly see Earth-sized worlds, from the ground GENIE will struggle to see even the giant planets that are known to exist around approximately 100 Sun-like stars. "The problem is the atmosphere," explains Malcolm Fridlund, study scientist for both GENIE and Darwin, "It corrugates the light rays as they pass through." This effectively blurs the images and washes out faint signals - such as those coming from even large planets - making them extremely difficult to see. One of the recent planetary discoveries, however, is the most significant yet for the GENIE scientists, as it may just be visible to their instrument.
Stephane Udry, from the Observatoire de Genève, and his collaborators report in the latest issue of Astronomy and Astrophysics that the star HD73256 has a Jupiter-sized planet orbiting its parent star in just 2.54 days. The short orbital period indicates that the planet is very close to its parent star. In fact, it orbits just 5.5 million kilometres above the surface of the star - ten times closer to its star than Mercury gets to our Sun.
"GENIE is really designed to test the techniques we will use on Darwin but if we can actually see some giant planets as well, that will be a bonus," says Fridlund. GENIE will be biggest investigation of nulling interferometry to date. This autumn, industrial partners will begin work on its design and it could be collecting science data by 2008.
At that time, HD73256's planet will hopefully be revealed for the world to see.
Stephane Udry |