A newly discovered exo planet named 51 Eri b, a study whose results was first published on Science Mag, was the first image captured by the Gemini Planet Imager.
The Gemini Planet Imager is a next generation adaptive optics instrument being built for the Gemini Telescope. Its mission is to capture images of extrasolar or exo planets orbiting near stars. A GPI Exoplanet Survey team was created in 2011 to carry out an 890-hour campaign, which will run from 2014 to 2016, to search and characterize exo planets around 600 stars.
Washington Post reports that while NASA's Kepler space observatory has discovered its fair share of planets, it does so indirectly by detecting a loss of starlight as a planet passes in front of its star. GPI instead searches for light from the planet itself. "To detect planets, Kepler sees their shadow," Bruce Macintosh, the study's lead author and a professor of physics at the Kavli Institute at Stanford University, said in a statement published on Eureka Alert.
Twice the mass of Jupiter and considered the lightest planet to ever be captured, its detection through visible light is an extraordinary feat in the astronomical community. In addition, Macintosh's team found that the planet "shows the strongest methane signature ever detected on an alien planet" as told by PlanetImager.org.
Constructed for the Gemini South Telescope in Chile, high-contrast imaging instrument GPI was designed specifically to find young planets orbiting bright stars. Older versions of direct imaging telescopes only detect exoplanets at relatively wide separations from their host star which are at distances greater than 10 AU (where 1 AU = average distance of the Earth to the Sun). However with GPI, astronomers can see objects as close as 5 AU. "Right now the only kind of planets we can see with direct imaging are giant planets (above a Jupiter mass), and most importantly, young planets," Macintosh said in a statement to io9.
Notably, 51 Eri b is considered a young planet in a cosmological perspective - just 20 million year old. It's reported to have formed 40 million years after the dinosaurs have become extinct.
Temperature pegged at 800 degrees Fahrenheit, it's viewed as one of the coldest exo planets discovered. While this is not the youngest Jupiter-like planet to be discovered, scientists remark that 51 Eri b is very similar to Jupiter during its infancy. "In the atmospheres of the cold giant planets of our solar system, carbon is found as methane, unlike most exo planets, where carbon has mostly been found in the form of carbon monoxide," NASA AMES astrophysicist Mark Marley explained to iO9.
"Since the atmosphere of 51 Eri b is also methane-rich, it signifies that this planet is well on its way to becoming a cousin of our own familiar Jupiter," Marley added.