Bruce Macintosh and Peter Michaud
Figure 1.
World’s Most Powerful Planet
Finder Turns its Eye to the Sky:
First Light with the
Gemini Planet Imager
The following article is an adaptation of the news featured in a press conference
at the January 2014 meeting of the American Astronomical Society.
After nearly a decade of development, construction, and testing, the world’s most advanced
instrument for directly imaging and analyzing planets around other stars is pointing skyward
and collecting light from distant worlds.
The instrument, called the Gemini Planet Imager (GPI), was designed, built, and optimized
for imaging faint planets next to bright stars and probing their atmospheres. It will also be a powerful tool for studying dusty, planet-forming disks around young stars. It is the most advanced such instrument
to be deployed on one of the world’s biggest telescopes — the 8-meter
Gemini South telescope in Chile.
Gemini Planet Imager’s
first light image of Beta
Pictoris b, a planet
orbiting the star Beta
Pictoris. The star, Beta
Pictoris, is blocked in this
image by a mask so its
light doesn’t interfere
with the light of the
planet. In addition to
the image, GPI obtains a
spectrum from every pixel
element in the field-ofview to allow scientists to
study the planet in great
detail.
Beta Pictoris b is a giant
planet — several times
larger than Jupiter —
and is approximately 10
million years old. These
near-infrared images
(1.5-1.8 microns) show
the planet glowing
in infrared light from
the heat released in its
formation.
Processing by Christian
Marois, NRC Canada.
“Even these early first light images are almost a factor of 10 better
than the previous generation of instruments. In one minute, we are
seeing planets that used to take us an hour to detect,” says Bruce Macintosh of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory who led the
team that built the instrument.
GPI detects infrared (heat) radiation from young Jupiter-like planets in wide orbits around other stars, those equivalent to the giant
planets in our own Solar System not long after their formation. Every
planet GPI sees can be studied in detail.
January2014 2013 Year in Review
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