Congratulations! It’s a planet! A giant, gassy, scorchin’ hot giant. And it has its mother’s glowing complection.

exoplanet photo sphere

This is just more fabulous space-ery from the VLT (Very Large Telescope) at the Euro observatory complex down in Chile (photo swiped from Space.com). Yeah, I’ve done title explorations for places like Disney & Warner Bros. The Euro folk shoulda hired me for naming this sucker. I mean, “Very Large Telescope” has a certain post-clever-title sort of we’re-callin-it-like-we-see-it thing going for it, but we Earthers could’ve done better. Anyway, the photo is spectacular – you can see the void-path the gas giant is carving thru the disc material as it orbits (and accretes mass).  The proud parent star is 370 LY away, the planet is toasty warm at 1,800 F and is multiples-of-Jupiter sized. So, new planet snapped in its nursery. What a cutie.

 

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