Scientists have detected light signals from previously unseen dim companions of eight luminous stars by combining data from ESA’s Gaia mission with ESO’s GRAVITY instrument.
An international team of astronomers searched Gaia’s catalogue, which lists hundreds of thousands of stars that are suspected to have a companion. They identified eight stars to be targeted by GRAVITY, the advanced near-infrared interferometer at the Very Large Telescope of ESO, at Cerro Paranal in Chile.
GRAVITY caught the light signal of all eight predicted companions, seven of which were unknown until now. Five companions are brown dwarfs, celestial objects in between planets and stars. They are more massive than the heaviest of planets but lighter and fainter than the lightest of stars.
One of the brown dwarfs spotted in this study orbits its host star at the same distance as Earth from the Sun. This is the first time a brown dwarf so close to its host star could be directly captured.
The result unlocks the possibility to soon capture images of planets close to their host stars.
[Image description: A large ball in the foreground is the focus of the image. The sphere has a brown-black colour with bright stripes and swirls of red and orange. To the top right of the image there is another smaller but brighter ball. This is white-yellow-orange in colour with thin and short, orange, filaments propagating outward. White spots dot the mostly black background, an orange-brown halo envelops the brighter ball.]