Animated video of the rotation of an exoplanet around its star

The video below is the first one where the rotation of an exoplanet around its star is shown. It is clear that this video was not filmed on camera - rather, it is an animated sequence of a series of images taken with the Gemini Planet Imager tool. The instrument was created for the Gemini South telescope (Gemini South) , which was built in 2000, is located on the Sero Pacino mountain (isp. Cerro Pachón), 2700 meters above sea level in the Chilean Andes.

The images used in this video were received from November 2013 to April 2015. Only a fragment is shown here, a part of the planet’s path around its star, while the cycle time is 22 years.


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The resolution of the pictures is very low, respectively, and the video can not be called super-quality. But this, as mentioned above, is the first of its kind video of exoplanet rotation around its star. The planet itself is Beta Pictoris b, it is 10-12 times larger than Jupiter. This whole planetary system is located 60 light years from Earth. If you fly there with the speed of the New Horizons probe (at the moment it is the fastest device ever launched from Earth), then it will take about a million years to reach this planetary system.

Moreover, observation of exoplanets is still difficult because of one fact: the planets do not glow by themselves, they reflect the light of their star. And the problem is that the luminosity of exoplanets is many thousands of times lower than the luminosity of stars. Accordingly, it is very difficult to find such objects, and even harder is to fix the found object on film. However, scientists are working in this direction, and in the next three years, Gemini Planet Imager will explore another 600 different stars.