Bruce Macintosh and Peter Michaud
Figure 1.
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 fieldof-view 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.
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.
“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.
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GeminiFocus
January2014