Exeter astronomer wins internationals award for planet
discovery
A discovery by a team including a scientist from the University
of Exeter has won the 2009 Newcomb Cleveland Prize of the American
Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
Dr Jenny Patience of the University of Exeter was part of an
international team that captured the first-ever image of multiple
planets orbiting a star other than our own.
The Association’s oldest prize, now supported by Affymetrix, the
Newcomb Cleveland Prize annually recognises the author or authors
of an outstanding paper published in the Research Articles or
Reports sections of the leading academic journal Science between
June and the following May.
Dr Patience and her colleagues were awarded the $25,000 prize at
an event held at the meeting of the AAAS in San Diego, California,
on 20 February.
The research team was led by Dr Christian Marois of the National
Research Council of Canada’s Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics
(Victoria, BC, Canada). While researchers typically infer a
planet’s presence indirectly through its influence on the host star
or an intervening star, this team imaged three planets directly
using two of the largest telescopes in the world, the Gemini North
and Keck telescopes on Mauna Kea in Hawaii.
The star, HR 8799, is 128 light years from Earth. It is a ‘main
sequence star', similar to the Sun in that it is in the prime of
its life, fuelled by nuclear reactions within its core, with a mass
1.5 times greater than the Sun.
The system resembles a scaled-up version of the three giant
planets in our solar system, according to the authors, with planets
more massive and orbiting around the star at larger distances than
the corresponding solar system planets.
Dr Jenny Patience of the Astrophysics Group in the University of
Exeter's School of Engineering, Mathematics and Physical Sciences,
said: “We’ve been trying to capture images of extrasolar planets
around stars for many years so it was incredibly exciting to
capture pictures of three at once.
“This was a key step in the journey towards understanding what
is out there, beyond our own solar system. I’m delighted that our
discovery has been recognised through this prestigious award.”
The University of Exeter has one of the UK’s largest
astrophysics groups working in the fields of star formation and
exoplanet research. The group focuses on one of the most
fundamental problems in modern astronomy – when do stars and
planets form and how does it happen? They conduct observations with
the world’s leading telescopes and carry out numerical simulations
to study young stars, their planet-forming discs, and exoplanets.
This research helps to put our Sun and the solar system into
context and understand the variety of stars and planetary systems
that exist in our Galaxy. Over the next three years, the University
is investing £80 million in five areas of interdisciplinary
scientific research, one of which is Extrasolar Planets.