HR 8799Article Free Pass
HR 8799, star that has the first extrasolar planetary system to be seen directly in an astronomical image. HR 8799 is a young (about 60 million years old) main-sequence star of spectral type A5 V located 128 light-years from Earth in the constellation Pegasus. Observations of this star taken by the Infrared Astronomical Satellite and the Infrared Space Observatory showed a disk of dust such as that expected in the last stages of planetary formation. In 2008 an international team of astronomers released images taken with the telescopes at the Keck and Gemini North observatories of three planets orbiting HR 8799. A fourth planet was discovered in 2010. Observations show that the planets move with the star and therefore are not background objects. The planets range in mass from 7 to 10 times that of Jupiter and orbit between 2.2 and 10.2 billion km (1.3 and 6.3 billion miles) from HR 8799. These planets are gas giants with temperatures of about 900 to 1,100 kelvins (600 to 800 °C, or 1,200 to 1,500 °F).
The table lists comparative data for the planets of the HR 8799 system.
|object||distance from star||mass
|HR 8799b||71||10,600||7 (5–11)||~460||86,000|
|HR 8799c||38||5,700||10 (7–13)||~190||86,000|
|HR 8799d||24||3,600||10 (7–13)||~100||86,000|
|HR 8799e||14.5||2,200||9 (5–13)||~50|
|*One astronomical unit (AU) is the mean distance of Earth from the Sun.
**Numbers in parentheses indicate a range of likely masses.
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