20 years ago, on September 10, 2004, the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile photographed an exoplanet called 2M1207b for the first time. The photograph was the first direct evidence for the existence of planets outside our Solar System. This discovery also confirmed theoretical assumptions about the presence of planets around other stars.
What makes 2M1207b still unique? Until the moment of discovery, the idea of planets outside the Solar System was only a hypothesis. This image showed an exoplanet orbiting the brown dwarf 2M1207 at a distance of 230 light-years from Earth. Brown dwarfs, objects between planets and stars, have masses that are 42 times smaller than the mass of the Sun but 25 times larger than Jupiter. The planet 2M1207b was five times larger than Jupiter.
According to Gael Chauvin, an astronomer at the European Southern Observatory, planet 2M1207b probably formed differently than the planets in our system. It formed due to the gravitational collapse of a cloud of gas and dust, similar to how stars arise.
In the image, 2M1207b looks close to its star, although it is actually orbiting at a distance twice that of Neptune’s orbit around the Sun. The image was created from three infrared exposures, giving a better view of the planet against a bright star. This method is particularly important for finding exoplanets because infrared radiation reduces the difference in brightness between planets and their stars.
The photo was taken with the 8.2-meter Yepun telescope, part of a very large telescope located at the Paranal Observatory at 2,635 meters above sea level in the Atacama Desert, Chile.
This is the first exoplanet to be photographed directly, but not the last. Since the discovery of 2M1207b, more than 200 exoplanets have been discovered through direct observations, and a total of more than 5,600 worlds outside our Solar System have been confirmed.
Earlier we reported on how to search for exoplanets and whether they contain life.
According to livescience.com
