p2pnet news view | Cool:- A picture of a planet orbiting a star similar to our sun has been captured by astronomers at the University of Toronto in Canada.

David Lafreniere, Ray Jayawardhana and Marten van Kerkwijk, “made their finding after doing a survey of 80 stars taken using the Gemini North telescope on the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii,” says the CBC.

“In the near-infrared images taken of one young star about 500 light years from Earth, they discovered a companion to the star which they say is a giant planet about eight times the size of Jupiter,” says the story, adding:

“The unique discovery raises the possibility that followup study will be able to take a more detailed spectra of the planet and learn about its chemical composition, said Jayawardhana.”

You can see the star as a small dot a little below the top of the image, and to the left of the ’sun’.

The team’s findings are posted online on Cornell University’s arXiv website.

CBC – U of T researchers capture image of planet orbiting distant star, September 15, 2008

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 16th, 2008 at 8:05 am and is filed under Cool Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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