About Space Only's video: Simulation of HD 106906 b s Orbit

This video shows the possible orbit of exoplanet HD 106906 b. The light from the twin stars has been masked to block their bright glare, allowing the Hubble Space Telescope to see the circumstellar disk and exoplanet. The planet resides outside its system's circumstellar debris disk, which is akin to our own Kuiper Belt. The second part of the video shows a simulation of how the planet orbits counterclockwise around the entire system as seen from Earth. The the 11-Jupiter-mass exoplanet was discovered in 2013 with the Magellan Telescopes at the Las Campanas Observatory in the Atacama Desert of Chile. However, astronomers did not know anything about the planet's orbit. This required something only the Hubble Space Telescope could do: collect very accurate measurements of the planet's motion over 14 years with extraordinary precision. The team used data from the Hubble archive that provided evidence for this motion. The exoplanet resides extremely far from its host pair of bright, young stars—more than 730 times the distance of the Earth from the Sun. This wide separation made it enormously challenging to determine the 15,000-year-long orbit in such a relatively short time span of Hubble observations. The planet is creeping very slowly along its orbit, given the weak gravitational pull of its very distant parent stars. The Hubble team was surprised to find that the remote world has an extreme orbit that is very misaligned, elongated and external to the debris disk that surrounds the exoplanet's twin host stars. The debris disk itself is very unusual-looking, perhaps due to the gravitational tug of the wayward planet. This is the first time that astronomers have been able to measure the motion of a massive Jupiter-like planet that is orbiting very far away from its host stars and visible debris disk. HD 106906 is a 15-million-year-old binary star system in the southern constellation of Crux at about 336 light-years from Earth. Credit: NASA, ESA, P. Kalas (University of California, Berkeley and SETI Institute), and J. DePasquale (STScI)