English: This animation shows the protoplanet and disk of the star HD 169142.

The images were taken by ESOs Very Large Telescope with the SPHERE instument. A paper by Hammond et al. describes the observation: https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.11302

The disk of HD 169142 shows a distinctive gap and it is suspected that the protoplanet b is carving the gap inside the disk. The images from 2015, 2017 and 2019 shows that the protoplanet candidate is moving. Hammond et al. showed that this is consistent with motion of a planet at about 37 astronomical units.

In this animation I show a still image of the disk taken at 2015-05-03 and a cutout with the movement of the candidate protoplanet between 2015 and 2019.

Details about this animation:

Used Software: SAO Image DS9, Photoshop Elements

Background:

Date: (2015-05-03)

File: HD169142_2015-05-03_Q_phi_denoise.fits

Animated motion of the protoplanet:

Dates: (2015-05-03), (2017-04-30), (2019-05-19)

Files: HD169142_2015-05-03_Q_phi.fits, 2017_final_PCA-SADI2_ann_npc_sdi1_npc_adi1_mask6.8_deltarot1.0-4.0_maxfr50__all_ch.fits, 2019_final_PCA-SADI1_full_npc1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10-11-12-13-14-15-16-17-18-19-20_mask6.3_deltarot1.0_maxfr50__all_ch.fits