Astronomers explore inner regions of young star and its planets residing 130 light-yrs away

Astronomers have uncovered the inner region of a young star and its planets located 130 light-years from Earth.

The observations mark the first results of a new exoplanet survey called LEECH, or LBT Exozodi Exoplanet Common Hunt.

The planetary system of HR8799, a young star only 30 million years old, was the first to be directly imaged, with three planets found in 2008 and a fourth one in 2010.

The LEECH survey began at the Large Binocular Telescope, or LBT, in southeastern Arizona in February 2013 to search for and characterize young and adolescent exoplanets in the near-infrared spectrum (specifically, at a wavelength of 3.8 micrometers that astronomers call the L' band).

LEECH exploited the superb performance of the LBT adaptive optics system to image exoplanets with the L/M-band infrared camera, or LMIRCam, installed in the LBT Interferometer, or LBTI.

The study was dedicated to studying the planet architecture of the HR 8799 system, according to the leading author, Anne-Lise Maire, a postdoctoral fellow at INAF-Padova Observatory in Padova, Italy. The team sought to constrain the orbital parameters of the four known giant planets and the physical properties of a putative fifth planet inside the known planets.

The results of this study favor an architecture for the system based on multiple double resonances, in other words, each of the three outer planets takes about twice as long to complete an orbit around the star as its neighbor closer to the star.

The study is published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.