Exoplanet going, but not gone: Recovery and orbit of Fomalhaut b

by Paul Kalas (UC Berkeley)

Friday 21 Sept 2012, 15:15 → 16:30 Europe/Stockholm

FA32

Among the thousands of known exoplanets, less than a dozen have been directly imaged due to the difficulty of suppressing glare from the central star. Fomalhaut is one such nearby star where a huge Kuiper Belt of dust was first discovered using the Hubble Space Telescope, followed by the direct detection of a candidate planet, Fomalhaut b. The putative planet has unexpected characteristics, such as its relatively blue spectrum, leading to hypotheses that Fomalhaut b is a low-mass planet hosting a giant planetary ring seen in reflected light, or even conjecture that Fomalhaut b is a spurious instrumental artifact. Here we review the history of Fomalhaut's planetary system, and present new observations made in 2010 and 2012 that not only authenticate the existence of Fomalhaut b, but also reveal new features in the morphology of the dust belt that hint at the presence of other planets in the system. These new findings are potentially relevant as an empirical demonstration of the Solar System's early dynamical evolution.