The Gemini Planet Imager (GPI), dubbed as the world's most powerful exoplanet camera, has captured pictures of distant planets outside our solar system.
GPI was built and developed for almost a decade and its primary use is to capture images of faint planets which are near bright stars. It will also be used for studying planet-forming disks that orbits around young stars. To date, this imaging instrument is considered the most powerful and advanced tool that will be deployed on one of the biggest telescopes we have today, the Gemini South telescope located at Chile.
The GPI made its first look into the sky November 2013 and its debut as a space imager has been seamless for an extraordinarily powerful device with a size of a small car. For its first observations, the team looked into previously discovered planetary system and sought to discover other members of the system which weren't visible before.
The GPI obtained images of the young planet Beta Pictoris b, which is orbiting Beta Pictoris. With the use of polarization mode, the team was also able to see a faint disk of dust orbiting the young star, HR4796A. The dust disk is believed to be a remnant of the planet-formation of HR4796A.
"Even these early first-light images are almost a factor of 10 better than the previous generation of instruments. In one minute, we are seeing planets that used to take us an hour to detect," says Bruce Macintosh of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in a press release. Macintosh led the team who built GPI.
Although its main goal is to look at far places, GPI is also being used to study own Solar System. It has recently produced test images for Europa, one of the Jupiter's moon and these images can be used for mapping the changes of its surface composition. The images for Europa were released publicly today, at the 223rd meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Washington DC.
