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Some slightly aging news from Bad Astronomy way, it seems astrometry is coming good. A team has used observations from the Hubble telescope and other, older sources to track the motion of Epsilon Eridani caused by its planetary companion. All sorts of wonderful things were discovered, such as the fact the planet's orbit is in roughly the same plane as the dusty disc surrounding the star, bolstering the theory that planets are formed out of such discs. We hadn't had a chance to observe both planets and disc in the same system before and as BA says, if their orientation had turned out to be too different the theory would have been in trouble.
'Paper' here
A few other item of interest maybe. Apart from inclination other bits of information are also available like mass (around 1.5 times Jupiter's), period and periastron/apastron. Apparently the next best time for attempting direct detection of the planet will be late December 2007, otherwise we would have to wait almost seven years. Well, by then there probably will still not be any scopes available for pointing so oh well.
There are also hints of a second large planet with a period of more than fifty years. Possibly, if it turns out to be real this other planet could make the shape of the disc a bit more explained. That disc, by the way, is still hanging around because Epsilon Eridani is such a young system, thought to be about 800 million years old. So the unnamed would have been forming a bit before life on earth invented multicellularity
And as a special bonus paragraph, while interviewing at Borders I saw something I never would have expected - a Stephen Baxter novel filed under 'Literature'. Got to get me more of them.
'Paper' here
A few other item of interest maybe. Apart from inclination other bits of information are also available like mass (around 1.5 times Jupiter's), period and periastron/apastron. Apparently the next best time for attempting direct detection of the planet will be late December 2007, otherwise we would have to wait almost seven years. Well, by then there probably will still not be any scopes available for pointing so oh well.
There are also hints of a second large planet with a period of more than fifty years. Possibly, if it turns out to be real this other planet could make the shape of the disc a bit more explained. That disc, by the way, is still hanging around because Epsilon Eridani is such a young system, thought to be about 800 million years old. So the unnamed would have been forming a bit before life on earth invented multicellularity
And as a special bonus paragraph, while interviewing at Borders I saw something I never would have expected - a Stephen Baxter novel filed under 'Literature'. Got to get me more of them.
