First discovery of an exoplanet by SPHERE

The astronomical instrument SPHERE, installed since 2014 on the Very Large Telescope (VLT) of the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Chile, has made its first discovery of a planet around a star other than the Sun, known as an exoplanet. Only a handful of the 3,600 exoplanets detected since 1995 have been observed directly in this way. With a mass between 6 and 12 times that of Jupiter, HIP65426b is a young massive planet orbiting around a bright star in rapid rotation, located in the Scorpius-Centaurus stellar association. This discovery, which raises new questions about the formation of extrasolar systems, was made by an international team composed of scientists from IPAG (CNRS/Université Grenoble Alpes), LAM (CNRS/Aix-Marseille Université), LESIA (Observatoire de Paris/CNRS/Université Pierre et Marie Curie/Université Paris Diderot), the Laboratoire Lagrange (Observatoire de la Côte d'Azur/CNRS/Université Nice-Sophia Antipolis¹), the CRAL (Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1/ENS Lyon/CNRS) and the ONERA. Results will appear soon in the edition of Astronomy & Astrophysics . HIP65426b is the first exoplanet to be discovered by the SPHERE² planet imager. The planetary system in question is at a distance of 385 light-years from the Solar System, in the Scorpius-Centaurus Association which contains between 3000 and 5000 stars that formed at approximately the same time 10 to 17 million years ago.