Which telescope first spotted the planetary-mass companion 2M1207b in 2004?
Answer
Very Large Telescope
Which telescope first spotted the planetary-mass companion 2M1207b in 2004? It was the Very Large Telescope.
The European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope, or VLT, recorded 2M1207b in April 2004 at Paranal Observatory in northern Chile. The object orbits 2M1207, a young brown dwarf, rather than a normal hydrogen-burning star. Follow-up observations confirmed that the faint source shared the system’s motion and was a genuine planetary-mass companion.
The observation was historically important because 2M1207b became the first exoplanet to be directly imaged and the first known planet found orbiting a brown dwarf. The VLT used the NACO adaptive-optics instrument on Yepun, one of its 8.2-metre Unit Telescopes, to separate the faint companion from the much brighter central object.
Hubble observations later helped corroborate the result, but they did not make the original discovery. Keck and Spitzer are also major observatories, yet neither was the telescope credited with first spotting 2M1207b. The object is several times as massive as Jupiter and lies roughly 170 light-years away.