Size of this preview: 800 × 600 pixels. Other resolutions: 320 × 240 pixels | 640 × 480 pixels | 1,024 × 768 pixels | 1,280 × 960 pixels | 2,560 × 1,919 pixels | 4,000 × 2,999 pixels.
Original file (4,000 × 2,999 pixels, file size: 1.67 MB, MIME type: image/jpeg)
 | This is a file from the Wikimedia Commons. Information from its description page there is shown below. Commons is a freely licensed media file repository. You can help. |
Summary
| Description |
English: This seemingly unspectacular series of dots with varying distances between them actually shows the slow waltz of two brown dwarfs. The image is a stack of 12 images made over the course of three years with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. Using high-precision astrometry, an Italian-led team of astronomers tracked the two components of the system as they moved both across the sky and around each other.
The observed system, Luhman 16AB, is only about six light-years away and is the third closest stellar system to Earth — after the triple star system Alpha Centauri and Barnard’s Star. Despite its proximity, Luhman 16AB was only discovered in 2013 by the astronomer Kevin Luhman. The two brown dwarfs that make up the system, Luhman 16A and Luhman 16B, orbit each other at a distance of only three times the distance between the Earth and the Sun, and so these observations are a showcase for Hubble’s precision and high resolution. The astronomers using Hubble to study Luhman 16AB were not only interested in the waltz of the two brown dwarfs, but were also searching for a third, invisible, dancing partner. Earlier observations with ESO’s Very Large Telescope indicated the presence of an exoplanet in the system. The team wanted to verify this claim by analysing the movement of the brown dwarfs in great detail over a long period of time, but the Hubble data showed that the two dwarfs are indeed dancing alone, unperturbed by a massive planetary companion. |
| Date | |
| Source | https://www.spacetelescope.org/images/potw1723a/ |
| Author | ESA/Hubble & NASA, L. Bedin et al. |
Licensing
  |
ESA/Hubble images, videos and web texts are released by the ESA under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license and may on a non-exclusive basis be reproduced without fee provided they are clearly and visibly credited. Detailed conditions are below; see the ESA copyright statement for full information. For images created by NASA or on the hubblesite.org website, or for ESA/Hubble images on the esahubble.org site before 2009, use the {{PD-Hubble}} tag.
Conditions:
Notes:
|
.jpg) |
This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.
Attribution: ESA/Hubble
- You are free:
- to share – to copy, distribute and transmit the work
- to remix – to adapt the work
- Under the following conditions:
- attribution – You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.
File history
Click on a date/time to view the file as it appeared at that time.
| Date/Time | Thumbnail | Dimensions | User | Comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| current | 00:13, 7 June 2017 | | 4,000 × 2,999 (1.67 MB) | Huntster | Full size. |
| 15:02, 6 June 2017 |  | 1,280 × 960 (106 KB) | Jmencisom | User created page with UploadWizard |
File usage
The following page uses this file:
Global file usage
The following other wikis use this file:
- Usage on fr.wikipedia.org
- Usage on it.wikipedia.org
- Usage on pl.wikipedia.org
