New planet discovered in orbit of the young star of the Milky Way

According to a study published on Monday, a second planet has been discovered encircling Beta Pictoris, a nascent star of our own galaxy, offering astronomers a rare glimpse of the planetary system in the making.

"We are talking about a giant planet about 3000 times more massive than the Earth, located 2.7 times farther from its star than the Earth," said Anne-Marie Lagrange, astronomer at the National Center for Scientific Research. de France and principal author of a study in Nature Astronomy.

The new planet, β Pictoris c, completes its orbit every 1200 days or so. Like his big sister β Pictoris B, discovered by Lagrange and his team in 2009, it is a giant gas.

Visible to the naked eye, Beta Pictoris – with a mass nearly twice that of the Sun – is a newborn by comparison: it's only 23 million years old.

The sun is over 4.5 billion years old.

It is also relatively close, just over 63 light-years away and surrounded by a stellar dust disk.

This swirling halo of debris and gas was the first configuration of this type to be captured in the image, making Beta Pictoris a star of celebrity in the 1980s.

"To better understand the early stage of training and evolution, it is probably the best global system we know," Lagrange told AFP.

The observations show that the two planets are still taking shape.

β Pictoris c was discovered by analyzing high resolution data of a duration of 10 years obtained with instruments from the La Silla Observatory in northern Chile, managed by the Southern European Intergovernmental Observatory.

In 2014, scientists reported that β Pictoris b was traveling at a blistering speed of some 25 kilometers per second (90,000 km / h or 56,000 miles at the time).

Located in the southern constellation of Pictor – "The easel of the painter" – Beta Pictoris is the second brightest star in its constellation.

© 2019 AFP