A 12-year sequence of telescope images of a star and four planets orbiting
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A 12-year sequence of real telescope images shows four Jupiter-mass exoplanets orbiting a star 133 light-years away.
Paul Byrne posted a 12-year sequence of telescope images of star HR 8799, 133 light-years away, showing four exoplanets larger than Jupiter in orbit. The planets orbit at 16, 26, 43, and 69 AU. The animation consists of 10 real images with interpolated frames. The star is about 1.5 times the Sun's radius. Direct imaging of exoplanets this way is rare; the Nancy Grace Roman telescope's coronagraph, launching in the 2040s, aims to detect planets 100 million times fainter than their stars.
What commenters are saying
Commenters expressed awe at the direct imaging of exoplanets, drawing parallels to star motion around Sagittarius A* which proved the Milky Way's supermassive black hole and earned a 2020 Nobel Prize. Several noted the animation uses only 10 real images with interpolated frames. Two faint dots appearing in one frame were flagged as likely artifacts. Technical discussion covered the angular scale (20 AU scale bar equals half an arcsecond) and the star's true size, with corrections that the blacked-out region is a coronagraph mask, not the stellar surface.