PSR B1257+12 ( just the facts - a article written in 2007)
PSR B1257+12 (sometimes abbreviated to PSR 1257+12) is a pulsar located 980 light years from Earth.
As of 2006, it is believed to be orbited by three extrasolar planets. These were the first extrasolar planets ever discovered.
The first
planet known outside our Solar System
Pulsar
PSR B1257+12 is in
the constellation of Virgo. The designation PSR B1257+12 refers to its coordinates
in the B1950.0 epoch. It is located at about 980 light years from Earth.
PSR B1257+12 was discovered by the Polish astronomer Aleksander Wolszczan in 1990 using the Arecibo radio telescope. It is a millisecond pulsar, a kind of neutron star, & was found to have anomalies in the pulsation period, which led to investigations as to the cause of the irregular pulses. It has a rotation period of 6.22 milliseconds.
Planets
Artist's impression of the planets
orbiting PSR B1257+12In 1992, Aleksander Wolszczan & Dale Frail discovered
that the pulsar has two planets. These were the first extrasolar planets ever
discovered; as pulsar planets, they surprised many astronomers who expected to
find planets only around main sequence stars. Additional uncertainty surrounded
the system, because a claim of an earlier pulsar planet around PSR 1829-10 that
had to be retracted due to errors in calculations. Later, an additional planet
was discovered. Additionally, this system may have an asteroid belt or a Kuiper
belt.
The planets are believed to either be the rocky cores of former gas giants, or the result of a second round of planetary system formation resulting from unusual supernova remnants. If they are the remains of planets orbiting the star before supernova, they were theoretically gas giants with large rocky cores, whose atmospheres were stripped away by the supernova, & which spiralled inward to their current orbits.
It should be noted that the planets of PSR B1275+12 are designated from A to D (ordered by increasing distance), unlike planets around normal stars which follow the standard where the first discovered planet in the system is b, followed by c & so on.
PSR B1257+12 A is the innermost
planet orbiting the pulsar at a distance of 0.19 AU with an orbital period of
approximately 25 days. In 1997, it was claimed that this planet was in fact an
artifact caused by solar wind, but this claim has since been disproved. It is
about two times as massive as Earth's Moon.
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