GeminiFocus July 2016 | Page 12

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