Two planets orbiting the young sun TYC 8998-760-1
I am part of the team that currently carries out the Young Suns Exoplanet Survey (YSES) with the SPHERE extreme adaptive optics instrument at the ESO Very large telescope. The team is lead by Alexander Bohn a PhD student of Matthew Kenworthy and myself at Leiden Observatory. We recently found not one but two planets in wide orbits (160au and 320au) around the young solar analog TYC 8998-760-1. The inner planet b has 14 times the mass of Jupiter and planet c has 6 times the mass of Jupiter. This is only the third system around which more than one planet has been directly imaged and the first where the host star is a younger version of our own sun. Check the ESO press release out here (click) to find out more or go directly to the article we published here (click).
The planets move with the primary star
To distinguish planets bound to nearby stars from distant background stars we have to check if they are moving on the sky together with the host star. In the above animation two images taken about a year apart are shown. The host star is aligned in both images. The faint background stars in the image move to the upper left, while the bound planets b and c are standing still as the host star.
Young planets have a red color
Young planets are still hot after they formed. However they are much cooler than stars and so they radiate at much longer and thus more red wavelengths. In the above animation the wavelength is increasing from the near to the mid-infrared. Observe how both planets become brighter the longer the wavelength (with the faint low-mass planet c not detected in the final image).