An
international team of astronomers headed by Dutch researchers from
Leiden University has coincidently found a small companion around the
young double star CS Cha. The astronomers examined the dust disc of the
binary, while they stumbled upon the companion. The researchers suspect
that it is a planet in his toddler years that is still growing. The
astronomers used the SPHERE instrument on the European Very Large
Telescope in Chile. They will soon publish their findings in an article
that is accepted by the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
The binary star CS Cha and his special companion are located some six
hundred light years away from Earth in a star formation area in the
southern constellation Chameleon. The double star is just two to three
million years young. The researchers wanted to study the star to search
for a dust disc and for planets in the making.
During their
research on the binary star, the astronomers saw a small dot on the edge
of their images. The researchers dived into the telescope archives and
discovered the dot, but much fainter, also on 19 year old photographs
taken with the Hubble Space Telescope and on 11 year old photographs of
the Very Large Telescope. Thanks to the old photographs, the astronomers
were able to show that the companion moves with the binary and that
they belong together.
What the
companion looks like and how it was formed is unclear. The researchers
tried to fit various models on the observations, but they do not give a
hundred percent certainty. The companion may be a small brown dwarf
star, but it can also be a big super-Jupiter.
Lead author Christian Ginski
(Leiden Observatory, Leiden University) explains: "The most exciting
part is that the light of the companion is highly polarized. Such a
preference in the direction of polarization usually occurs when light is
scattered along the way. We suspect that the companion is surrounded by
his own dust disc. The tricky part is that the disc blocks a large part
of the light and that is why we can hardly determine the mass of the
companion. So it could be a brown dwarf but also a super-Jupiter in his
toddler years. The classical planet-forming-models can't help us."
In the future, the researchers want to examine the star and the companion in more detail. They want to use the international ALMA telescope on the Chajnantor plateau in the North Chilean Andes.
SPHERE
SPHERE is the abbreviation of Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast
Exoplanet REsearch instrument. It is a powerful planet hunter that is
attached to the European Very Large Telescope at Cerro Paranal in
northern Chile. The instrument has partly been developed in the
Netherlands. SPHERE can make direct images of exoplanets and dust discs
around stars. The instrument bypasses the bright star and looks
specifically at polarized light that is reflected by the atmosphere of
an exoplanet or the dust disc around a star.
Reference:
"First direct detection of a polarized companion outside of a resolved
circumbinary disk around CS Cha*", C. Ginski (1, 2), M. Benisty (3, 4),
R.G. van Holstein (1), A. Juhász (5), T.O.B. Schmidt (6), G. Chauvin (3,
4) , J. de Boer (1), M. Wilby (1), C.F. Manara (7), P. Delorme (4), F.
Ménard (4), P. Pinilla (8), T. Birnstiel (9), M. Flock(10), C. Keller
(1), M. Kenworthy (1), J. Milli (4, 11), J. Olofsson (12, 13), L. Pérez
(14), F. Snik (1), en N. Vogt (12). 1. Universiteit Leiden; 2.
Universiteit van Amsterdam; 3 en 14. Universidad de Chile (Chili); 4.
Univ. Grenoble Alpes (Frankrijk); 5. University of Cambridge (Verenigd
Koninkrijk); 6. Sorbonne Paris Cité (Frankrijk); 7 ESA/ESTEC, Noordwijk;
8. The University of Arizona (Verenigde Staten); 9.
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (Duitsland); 10.
Max-Planck-Institut für Astronomie (Duitsland); 11. European Southern
Observatory (Chili); 12 en 13. Universidad de Valparaíso (Chili), 2018,
accepted for publication in Astronomy and Astrophysics. (free preprint)
Dutch news release
