Figure 4.
V830 Tauri — a young (< 2 million years)
T-Tauri star — confirms both rapid planet
formation and early migration. Such early
forming “hot Jupiters” likely play a key role
in shaping planetary systems overall.
Gemini South GeMS/
GSAOI near-infrared
image of the N159W
field in the Large
Magellanic Cloud.
The image spans
1.5 arcminutes
across, resolves
stars to about 0.09
arcsecond, and is a
composite of three
filters (J, H, and Ks
in blue, green, and
red, respectively).
Integration time
for each filter was
25 minutes. Color
composite image
by Travis Rector,
University of Alaska
Anchorage.
million years. Thus, the authors suggest that
the first generation of massive stars at the
bubble’s core triggered the recent birth of the
YSOs around the periphery. A Gemini image
release features this work, and full results will
be published in Astronomy and Astrophysics. A
preprint is now available.
Innovative Gemini/CFHT
Partnership Explores
a “Hot Jupiter”
Figure 5.
Radial velocity (RV)
measurements of V830
Tauri, after filtering out
stellar activity, reveal
the presence of a “hot
Jupiter.” Data from
ESPaDOnS/Gemini,
ESPaDOnS/CFHT, and
NARVAL/TBL are plotted
as triangles, circles, and
squares, respectively, with
colors that code rotation
cycles. Lines show fits
to circular (solid) and
eccentric (dashed) orbits.
10
The exploration of other worlds has shown
that gas-giant planets lie very close to their
host stars. As they could not
have formed in their present
locations (radiation would
have dissolved them) questions remain: do these giants
move close-in when the system is young, after interacting with the protoplanetary
disk, or do they only move
later, following interaction
with multiple planets? The
discovery of a 0.77 MJupiter
exoplanet located within
0.06 astronomical units of
GeminiFocus
High-resolution spectroscopy over a
1.5-month campaign revealed the presence of the exoplanet in a telltale spectral “wobble,” leading the discovery team
to isolate the signal of the planet, find its
orbit, and determine its mass. Jean-François Donati (Observatoire Midi-Pyrénées,
France) led the work, which took advantage of the novel collaboration between
the Gemini Observatory and the Canada-France-Hawai‘i Telescope (CFHT) in
GRACES (Gemini Remote Access to CFHT
ESPaDOnS Spectrograph). GRACES uses an
innovative 270-meter fiber cable to transport
light from Gemini North’s 8-meter mirror to
the ESPaDOnS Spectrograph at CFHT. For this
work, the researchers also used ESPaDOnS on
CFHT and the spectropolarimeter NARVAL
on the 2-meter Telescope Bernard Lyot. Full
results appear in Nature and are featured on
the Gemini web page.
Nancy A. Levenson is Deputy Director and Head
of Science at Gemini Observatory and can be
reached at: [email protected]
July 2016