{"id":113750,"date":"2020-10-02T15:23:09","date_gmt":"2020-10-02T22:23:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2020\/10\/scientists-reveal-first-direct-image-of-an-exoplanet-only-63-light-years-away"},"modified":"2020-10-02T15:23:09","modified_gmt":"2020-10-02T22:23:09","slug":"scientists-reveal-first-direct-image-of-an-exoplanet-only-63-light-years-away","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2020\/10\/scientists-reveal-first-direct-image-of-an-exoplanet-only-63-light-years-away","title":{"rendered":"Scientists Reveal First Direct Image of an Exoplanet Only 63 Light-Years Away"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/scientists-reveal-first-direct-image-of-an-exoplanet-only-63-light-years-away3.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Most of the exoplanets we\u2019ve confirmed to date have never actually been seen directly. We confirm their presence by indirect means, such as the effect they have on their host star. But now, astronomers have revealed images of an indirectly found exoplanet.<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s not just an impressive feat of skills and technology. The combination of methods has given us a superb toolkit for measuring an exoplanet. For the first time, astronomers have measured both the brightness and the mass of an exoplanet \u2014 which has given us a new probe into how planets form.<\/p>\n<p>The exoplanet is Beta Pictoris c (\u03b2 Pic c), a gas giant orbiting the star \u2014 you guessed it \u2014 Beta Pictoris, just 63 light-years away. It\u2019s a very young, very bright star, around 23 million years old; as such, it\u2019s still surrounded by <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sciencealert.com\/nasa-s-new-planet-hunter-has-detected-its-first-exocomet-orbiting-an-alien-star\">a lot of dusty debris<\/a>, and its exoplanets \u2014 we\u2019ve confirmed two to date \u2014 are just babies, around 18.5 million years old.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Most of the exoplanets we\u2019ve confirmed to date have never actually been seen directly. We confirm their presence by indirect means, such as the effect they have on their host star. But now, astronomers have revealed images of an indirectly found exoplanet. It\u2019s not just an impressive feat of skills and technology. The combination of [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":513,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-113750","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113750","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/513"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=113750"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113750\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=113750"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=113750"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=113750"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}