Can you tell me about the new planet discovered around the star 70 Virginis?

Better than that, here is an image of the star that I extracted from the Palomar Digital Sky Survey:

This star is located near RA(2000) = 13h 28m 20s and Dec(2000) = +13deg 47' and is about magnitude +5m visually. It is 24 degrees north of the bright star Spica between the bright stars Epsilon Virginis and Arcturus.

According to the news releases, this star is very similar to the Sun, though a few hundred degrees cooler and 3 billion years older. The planet, discovered by Geoffrey Marcy at San Francisco State University and Paul Butler at UC Berkeley, has a 116 day orbit around the star and a mass of about 9 times that of Jupiter. Over a period of many years of observation, they detected the faint wobble of the star as the planet orbited it every 116 days. Its temperature is 185 K which is cool enough for organic molecules to exist, and there may be greenhouse heating at work to make liquid water possible. This is pure speculation, however.

 


Copyright 1997 Dr. Sten Odenwald

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