BIG GLASS: Mounted

to the Gemini South telescope high in the Chilean

Andes, GPI is a worldclass instrument meant to
see gas-giant exoplanets.

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S PA C E S C I E N C E

IN SEARCH
OF ALIEN JUPITERS
Two rival teams
of astronomers
are racing
to capture
unprecedented
images of giant
planets around
other stars.
What they find
could change
the future of
planet hunting
By Lee Billings

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Lee Billings is an associate editor at Scientic American.

He is author of Five Billion Years of Solitude: The Search
for Life among the Stars (Current/Penguin Group, 2013).

Macintosh is here to look for other Earthsor, more precisely,

for other Jupiters, which some scientists think are necessary for
rocky, habitable, Earth-like planets to exist. He is not interested
in finding planets like most astronomers do, watching for months
or even years as subtle shifts in a stars motion or brightness gradually reveal the presence of an unseen world. He is after instant
gratification: he intends to take actual pictures of remote planets,
to see them as points of light circling their distant stars, to look on
their gas-swirled faces across the gulf of light-years. Macintosh,
an astronomer at Stanford University, calls this direct imaging.
Besides the wind, there is another reason Macintosh is troubled: 600 kilometers to the north, on another arid Chilean peak,
astronomer Jean-Luc Beuzit is trying to do the exact same thing.
Beuzit, an astronomer at the Grenoble Institute of Planetology

and Astrophysics in France, is Macintoshs friendas well as his

rival. Fate and funding have brought these men to the mountains
at the same time to scour the heavens for planets, to learn whether our own is as common as dirt or cosmically rare.
Macintoshs tool of choice in this astronomical race is a multimillion-dollar car-sized complex of optics and sensors called the
Gemini Planet Imager (GPI). It is mounted to the immense eightmeter mirror of the Gemini South telescope, a polished disk of
silvered glass that would take up an eighth of a regulation basketball court. Macintosh and other astronomers pronounce the instruments acronym gee pie, as if they are exclaiming about
pastry. Beuzits answer to GPI is an even bigger, minivan-sized collection of gadgets called SPHERE, for Spectro-Polarimetric Highcontrast Exoplanet REsearch instrument. SPHERE is mounted

IN BRIEF

Astronomers know of thousands of

planets orbiting other stars but have
imaged only a handful. They have discovered and studied all the rest mostly
through indirect measurements.

Imaging a planet allows researchers

to learn more about its composition,
climate and prospects for life. But imaging is hard because planets are faint
and close to much brighter stars.

Imaging Earth-like planets is beyond

the reach of current telescopes. A new
generation of instruments is now taking
pictures of bigger, brighter worlds that
resemble our own Jupiter.

These new instruments will help scientists learn how giant planets form
and how they sculpt their surroundings,
preparing the way for future facilities to
take pictures of alien Earths.

PRECEDING PAGES: COURTESY OF GEMINI OBSERVATORY/AURA;

THIS PAGE: COURTESY OF G. HDEPOHL/EUROPEAN SOUTHERN OBSERVATORY

High in the remote Andes of central

Chile, the night sky is so dark that
the constellations are hard to see,
swallowed up in swarms of fainter
stars. The familiar yet alien view can
be disconcerting, but something else
troubles Bruce Macintosh when he
looks up late one May evening in 2014.
Even here, at 2,700 meters above sea
level, he is still staring through an
ocean of air, and the wind is rising.
The stars overhead are twinkling
a bit too much for his purposes.

42 Scientific American, August 2015

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HIGH AND DRY:

 PHERE, another planet
S
imager, seeks alien
Jupiters from the Very
Large Telescope in Chiles
barren Atacama Desert.

on another eight-meter telescope, at the European Southern

Observatorys Very Large Telescope array. Both projects have
been in development for more than a decade but debuted within months of each other. From their remote mountaintop perches, they are surveying mostly the same stars, seeking to be the
first with breakthrough snapshots of alien Jupiters.
Of the more than 5,000 worlds discovered orbiting other stars
over the past two decades, scarcely any have actually been directly imaged. Taking pictures is hard because even the largest,
least inhabitable planets are still very dim and appear very close
to their far brighter suns, as seen from far away. Take a picture
of a planeteven if it is a small smudge of pixelsand you can
learn a lot about that worlds composition, climate and possibilities for life. GPIs and SPHEREs quest for Jupiter-like worlds is
the state of the art; humans have yet to build telescopes big and
sophisticated enough to distill the faint light of an alien Earth
from the overpowering glare of an adjacent star. But when and
if they do, those facilities will almost certainly use instruments
developed from these two projects.
In astronomy, as in everyday life, seeing is believing. Although
direct imaging can be fiendishly difficult, it can also be much
faster than todays dominant planet-detection techniques, potentially delivering discoveries through pictures that take hours

or days to obtain rather than through months or years of painstaking analysis on arcane stellar data sets. Which is why, in this
race to take the first pictures of alien Jupiters, it is not a stretch
to say that every minute counts.
THE TORTOISE AND THE HARE

Time weighs heavily on Macintosh as he works in Gemini Souths

control room late that night in May 2014. He has a boyish face,
with a crescent of brown hair and lively eyes that peer from behind thick glasses. He is running on Diet Coke and adrenaline,
still jet-lagged from a string of connecting flights from California to Chile. One of his shoes is untied, and a faint smell of
smoke wafts through the air from a forgotten dinner of frozen
pizza, now carbonized in a nearby toaster oven. As he gazes at a
bank of computer screens monitoring GPIs vitals, it seems only
his body is in the roomhis mind is elsewhere, in the adjacent
dome housing the eight-meter telescope, following beams of
light bouncing through the innards of his instrument.
Before GPI can start finding new planets, it first must go
through commissioning, an extended sequence of tests and calibrations that started in late 2013 and, by this time in May 2014, is
in the final stages. The work is tedious and unglamorousno one
has ever won a prize for making sure an instrument operates prop-

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BUILDING JUPITERS

Birth of a Gas Giant: Two Scenarios

Planets form from the same disks of gas and dust that give birth to suns. A process called core accretion can make
giant planets from the bottom up, as tiny objects stick together to gradually build bigger ones, assembling a large core
that sweeps up a thick atmosphere. But a faster, top-down pathway called disk instability exists, in which clumps of
gas collapse directly into planethood. On average, young giants made by core accretion should be cooler than those
made by disk instability. By taking the temperatures of young giant planets via infrared imaging, GPI and
Gas and dust disk
SPHERE could reveal whether most giants are built from the bottom up or from the top down.
Young star
DISK INSTABILITY
Once a star is born, the clock is ticking on giant-planet formationthe starlight will blow
away gas within millions of years, oering limited time for cores to grow and collect gas via
accretion. In contrast, a dense, cold clump of gas could collapse to form a giant planet in
only thousands of years. Such a rapid, ecient collapse would generate and trap intense
heat within the newborn planet, giving it a powerful infrared glow for millions of years.
Gas and dust disk

Young star
Rocks collide and accumulate
into a solid core

Cold gas clump collapses,

creating a hot giant planet
Gas piles onto core,
aring around the very
hot forming planet

Giant planet slowly cools,

radiating trapped heat for
millions of years
Giant planet rapidly cools
after aring in brightness
during atmosphere formation

Thermal dierences between

giant planets are erased after
hundreds of millions of years
CORE ACCRETION
In core accretion, ecks of dust and ice collide and glom together into grains, then
pebbles, then boulders, gradually building a giant planets core. The core would glow
red-hot, aring in brightness as shock waves pulsed through the gas piling up around it.
That brief, intense aring would help cool the new planet by rapidly radiating away
heat, leaving it cooler and less luminous than a disk-instability planet of the same age.

Illustration by Ron Miller

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erly. In a race measured in minutes, GPI has a quarter-millionminute lead over SPHERE, which, by this same time, has only just
begun the commissioning process. That is small comfort to Macintosh, however, because SPHERE has a more capable suite of instruments and more guaranteed telescope time than GPI, which
should allow SPHERE to observe a greater number of stars in a
larger field of view at higher spectral resolutions across a wider
range of wavelengths. In other words, even though GPI is out front,
like the hare in Aesops famous fable, SPHERE could still come
from behind, tortoiselike, and find the sought-after planets first.
The twinkling of the stars comes from turbulence in the atmosphere, which has pushed the GPI team behind schedule. Waiting
for the wind to die down, Macintosh tells me stories from years
ago, when he, Beuzit, and other high-ranking members of the GPI
and SPHERE teams would carouse at astronomy conferences
around the world, their future conflict far from their minds.
Those times are long past. Wed get together,
drink heavily and trade stories, Macintosh
says. Even now, they arent really the enemythe clouds are the enemy. And the wind.
After half an hour, the winds have abated.
Okay, lets look at HD 95086, Macintosh
says, spinning in his chair to address the dozen or so team members in the room. They
spring to action, keying commands into the
computers controlling the telescope in the
dome next door. Within moments the telescope has slewed to the target, a bluish-white
dwarf star 300 light-years from Earth, in the
constellation Carina. HD 95086 is a young
star in astronomical termsonly about 17 million years oldand bears a giant planet five
times more massive than Jupiter, orbiting approximately twice as far out as Pluto. Earlier, less capable directimaging projects have seen this planet beforethe team will calibrate GPI by comparing its new images with the earlier results.
Like all the worlds that GPI seeks, this particular planet has
scarcely cooled at all since its formation. It glows brightly in infrared light. In terms of brightness, most planets are millions or
billions of times fainter than their stars, flecks of dust on the
cusps of thermonuclear fireballs. Young Jupiters are different.
They are more like red-hot embers cooling far from a campfire,
which is precisely why GPI or SPHERE has any hope of seeing
them and learning how exactly they formed and evolved.

any small, rocky planets out into the interstellar dark or down
into the fires of its star. Such giant worlds are too close to their
stars to be directly imaged with todays technology.
Like its much hotter exoplanetary cousins, Jupiter probably
also migrated early in its life, but for reasons unclear, its migration
was only temporary and did not bring the giant planet within spitting distance of the sun. Instead it perhaps ventured about as far
in as present-day Mars, before retreating back to the outer solar
system, where it has stayed ever since. And although the motions
of a giant planet can sabotage a planetary systems habitability, in
Jupiters case they seem to have made our solar system a more
hospitable place. At the least, Jupiters peregrinations are thought
to have flung water-rich comets and asteroids down to our already
formed planet, delivering life-giving oceans. At most, Jupiters
plunge into the inner solar system might have even cleared out
other preexisting planets, allowing Earth to form in the first place.

Most planets are far fainter than

their stars, flecks of dust around
nuclear fireballs. Young Jupiters
are different. They are more like
embers cooling far from a campfire,
which is why GPI or SPHERE
has any hope of seeing them.

JUPITERS SECRET ORIGINS

Among experts, it is an embarrassing open secret that no one really knows how the largest object orbiting our sun came to be.
But the experts desperately want to find out because Jupiter and
other giant planets are the architects of planetary systems,
shaping all that surrounds them.
Most of the known giant planets around other stars are not
really like Jupiter at all. Many exist in scorching half-week orbits alien to anything in our own solar system. The prevailing
theory is that these hellish worlds were born much farther out,
only to spiral down to hug their suns because of gravitational interactions with other planets or flows of gas. That migration
would be bad news for habitabilityalong the way, the gravitational field of an in-spiraling giant planet would most likely toss

Even so, what Jupiter gives, it could take away. Millions of years
from now, Jupiter may pummel our planet again with more giant
asteroids or comets, generating cataclysmic impacts that would
boil off our oceans and steam-cook our biosphere.
All these details, to some degree, can be traced to the nature
and timing of Jupiters mysterious formation. This much is certain: just more than four and a half billion years ago, a cold cloud
of gas and dust collapsed to form our sun. The remnants of the
cloud that did not fall into our nascent star spun out into a disk,
and from this material planets formed. Rocky worlds, being relatively small, are easy to assemble in a bottom-up process called
core accretion, where colliding rocks gradually glom together
over as much as 100 million years. Most researchers suspect Jupiter formed in the same way. But to do so, it would have had to
form far faster, building up Earth-sized cores in perhaps 10 million years, time enough to sweep up huge atmospheres before the
gassy feedstock is blown away by the intense light of a young star.
Another possibility exists. Giant planets could also form
much like stars do in a top-down process called disk instability.
In this scenario, something like Jupiter would achieve planethood through the direct, rapid collapse of a cold, overdense
clump of gas and dust in the outer region of a circumstellar disk.
It is almost impossible to distinguish between these two scenarios for Jupiter today because essentially all the evidence is literally buried below the giant planets dense, thick atmosphere.
Fortunately, there is another way to test whether giant planets

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COURTESY OF JEAN-LUC BEUZIT ET AL./EUROPEAN SOUTHERN OBSERVATORY/SPHERE CONSORTIUM

form from the bottom up or the top down: you can take their tem- device, a coronagraph, that strips out most of the starlight: the
peratures. A top-down formation directly from a collapsing clump light encounters a series of masks that filter out 99 percent of the
of gas would happen so quickly that an enormous amount of heat photons. The ones that make it through are focused and aimed at
would be trapped within the planet. A bottom-up formation would a mirror with a central hole polished to atomic-scale smoothness.
instead produce giant planets that, though still initially red-hot, The stars light falls down the hole, Macintosh explains, wherewould be relatively cooler. As more and more gas falls onto a as a planets light will instead bounce off the mirror and go deeprocky core, its impeded by the gas below it, by the atmosphere er into the instrument, reaching a supercooled spectrograph that
forming around the core, says GPI collaborator Mark Marley, splits the light into its constituent wavelengths (or colors).
whom I speak to later, a planet-formation theorist at the nasa
The picture on-screen is now a lumpy halo of white light surAmes Research Center who helped to
rounding a deep, central shadow where
model the process. A shock develops as
HD 95086 should be. The lumps
the gas slows down, and most of the encalled specklesare formed from unergy of that infalling gas radiates out,
wanted starlight that leaks through the
which flash-cools the forming planet.
coronagraph. Speckles can obscure a
So when you stop dumping gas on, the
planet in GPIs images or even masplanet is much cooler than it wouldve
querade as one. To distinguish bebeen from a direct collapse.
tween speckles and planets, the team
Thus, a giant planets temperature
takes a sequence of exposures at variis effectively a memory of its birth. The
ous infrared wavelengths. The sepaolder the planet gets, the more it cools,
ration between a star and a speckle is
and the more its memory fades. Some
proportional to the wavelength of light
four and a half billion years old, Jupiin an image, says GPIs project scienter long ago forgot how it formed. But
tist James Graham, a professor at the
giant planets younger than a few hunUniversity of California, Berkeley, as
UNBLINKING EYE: Light from the star
dred million yearsthe very planets
we stare at the screen. At shorter, bluer
HR 4796A is filtered out in this SPHERE
GPI and SPHERE are trying to image
wavelengths, a speckle will appear closimage, revealing a faint ring of dust,
in the infraredshould still have their
er to a star; at longer, redder waveperhaps sculpted by an unseen planet.
thermal memories intact. Surveying
lengths, that same speckle will appear
hundreds of bright, youthful nearby
farther away, Graham explains. So
stars, both projects may probe the temwhen you see the whole [wavelength]
peratures and histories of dozens of giant planets, unraveling the sequence, the speckles will move. A planet wont.
secret of their formation and shedding light on how habitable
Macintosh scrolls back and forth through the stacked exposystems like our own came to be.
sures like frames in a movie, and the halo seems to breathe, expanding and contracting as all the lumps move in unison. All the
IMAGING AN ALIEN JUPITER
lumps, that is, save for one: a lone, fixed dot of planetary light
As the GPI team prepares to observe HD 95086, a monochrome fished from a sea of stellar speckles. In less than half an hour, we
circle materializes on one of Macintoshs screens. It seems to have gone from seeing only the wind to staring at a distant world
contain a heavily pixelated fluid, like a digitized close-up of a around another star. Further analysis of the planets spectrum
rushing river or an untuned television awash with static.
from GPI data hints that the planet is extremely red, perhaps the
Youre looking at the wind, Macintosh says. Thats starlight result of an excess of light-scattering dust in its upper atmoshining through atmospheric turbulence and falling on a detec- sphere. It is a small but thrilling detail to learn about a world
tor that drives our adaptive optics. Adaptive optics are comput- that is 300 light-years away.
er-controlled deformable mirrors that change their shape hunNot all targets are so difficult to see; closer, brighter stars can
dreds or even thousands of times a second to combat atmo- give up some of their secrets far more readily. Earlier, the GPI
spheric distortions, allowing astronomers to capture images of team had needed only a single 60-second exposure to capture an
celestial objects that rival those available from space telescopes. image of Beta Pictoris b, a hot, young giant planet 63 light-years
With a few keystrokes and verbal commands to his team, Macin- from Earth that orbits its star at almost twice the Jupiter-sun distosh powers up GPIs adaptive optics. Mounted underneath the tance. The ease of seeing that planet suggests that direct imageight-meter telescope, GPIs two deformable mirrorsan off-the- ing, at last, is becoming routine: a slightly older direct imager on
shelf glass woofer and a smaller, custom-built tweeter packed Gemini South had previously taken a similar image of Beta Pictowith more than 4,000 actuatorsare now rippling and curling ris b, although it required more than an hour of observation and
in synchrony, matching each transient light-smearing pocket extensive postprocessing. The new images allowed the GPI team
and flow of overlying air with a corresponding dip or spike in to estimate the orbit of Beta Pictoris b with higher precision than
their surfaces, sculpting the rays of starlight back to near perfec- ever before, revealing that in 2017 it might transit across the face
tion. The result seems magical: the turbulent circle on Macin- of its star as seen from Eartha rare alignment that would be a
toshs screen becomes smooth and placid, as if the atmosphere boon for scientists seeking to learn more about the distant giant.
overhead has suddenly disappeared. HD 95086 is now a brilliant
In the remaining hours before sunrise, the GPI team images
glare on-screen. There is no sign of a planet.
binary stars, faint debris disks, and even Saturns moon Titan,
To reveal the stars known planet, Macintosh engages another peering down through its thick, hazy, hydrocarbon-filled atmoSCIENTIFIC AMERICAN ONLINE Read more about the science and technology of planet imaging at ScientificAmerican.com/aug2015/alien-jupiters

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sphere to its blotchy surface. Near dawn, when the glow of the
approaching sun begins filtering up from the horizon, Macintosh
leans far back in his chair and sighs, exhausted but satisfied.
On the final night of the six-day run, the GPI team finds its
first planet, orbiting a 20-million-year-old star at twice the Jupiter-sun distance. Macintosh is not the first to notice itRobert
de Rosa, a postdoctoral student at U.C. Berkeley, spies the flickering dot while looking over another teammates shoulder at some
otherwise unremarkable GPI images. Subsequent observations
show it to be between two and three times Jupiters mass, with a
methane-filled atmosphere hot enough to melt lead. The planet
is 100 light-years from Earth, but it is the closest thing to Jupiter
astronomers have ever seen.
This is the first planet anyone has ever found that looks like a
warm version of Jupiter rather than a very cool star, Macintosh
says. This planet may be young enough to still remember its formation process. With enough observations we could pin down its
mass and age and figure out whether it formed from the bottom
up, like we think Jupiter did, or from the top down, like a star.
When Macintosh tells me, he also vows me to secrecy until
the GPI team can write and submit a paper. SPHERE could very
easily see this, too, he says. We dont know if theyve looked yet
at the same star. We are all nervous well get scooped.
FIRST LIGHT FOR THE FUTURE

Shortly after dawn, I leave Gemini South, catch an airplane

north, rent a car and speed on a lonely highway through Chiles
high, dry Atacama Desert, traveling more than 600 kilometers
door-to-door to reach SPHERE before night falls. I arrive at
SPHEREs observatory, the Very Large Telescope, just after s unset.
In a cramped control room Beuzit, the projects leader, is marshaling his troops as the commissioning begins. The astronomers
are hunched over computer screens, quietly conversing in French,
German and English, trying to ignore the cameras and boom microphones of a visiting documentary film crew. Beuzit, with his
unkempt dark hair and beard, looks a bit like the late film director
Stanley Kubrick. He drifts from station to station, sipping espresso, pausing here and there to listen and advise. A recently emptied bottle of Laurent-Perrier champagne sits on a nearby bookshelf, SPHERE 1st Light scrawled in black marker on its label.
SPHERE performs admirably during commissioning, producing gorgeous pictures of a variety of celestial targets, including a faint dust ring around HR 4796A, an eight-million-yearold star 237 light-years from Earth in the constellation Centaurus [see illustration on opposite page]. Later, as I gaze at the
ring with the blotted-out star at its center, I feel like I am being
watchedit looks like an enormous eye, staring across the interstellar gulf. But despite those pretty pictures, on the night of
my visit, SPHERE is not quite ready to go discover new planets,
Beuzit tells me. Not all is well with the systems adaptive optics:
some of the mirror-bending actuators on SPHEREs 1-million,
1,377-element deformable mirror are failing, and no one on the
team can figure out why. The ultimate solution, Beuzit says, may
be to replace the entire mirror with a new one using different
actuator technology. Even so, he is optimistic that SPHERE and
GPI alike will each meet and exceed their goals. In the meantime, commissioning must go onit concluded earlier this year,
generating its own first batch of early science observations, producing images of several previously imaged planetary systems.

When I ask him about SPHEREs rivalry with GPI, Beuzits

first response is only to smile and sip his coffee. After a moment,
he speaks carefully. Once we both start discovering new planets, no one will remember who was first on-sky, Beuzit says.
Im not saying that we wont compete and fight, us and the
Americans. But Bruce Macintosh and I have known each other
for 15 years, and we both know how hard this is. We celebrate
our successes and share our difficulties to improve both of our
systems, to prepare the way for the next generation of observatories and imagers.
We are entering a new age as all these facilities come online
at almost the same time, says Dimitri Mawet, a professor at the
California Institute of Technology and at the time a SPHERE
principal instrument scientist. Were going to discover many
wonderful things, but were also going to significantly push the
adaptive optics technology forward. That will be fundamental
for the next generation of telescopes, which will require these
kinds of controls just to keep their huge mirrors aligned.
One of those new telescopes is being planned just 20 kilometers to the northeast of SPHERE, on the 3,000-meter peak of
Cerro Armazones. Shortly after my visit, explosives blast off the
peaks top, clearing ground for the construction of the European
Extremely Large Telescope, one of three supersized observatories slated to debut in about a decade. Paired with the unprecedented light-gathering power of such an observatorys gargantuan 30- or 40-meter mirror, a system similar to SPHERE or GPI
would be able to image not only self-luminous Jupiters but also
cooler, 1,000 times fainter, potentially habitable planets orbiting
the suns nearest neighboring stars. A dedicated direct-imaging
mission in space could then probe them even further, seeking
signs of life. Provided, that is, such worlds are even there to see.
The prospect of getting those images, glimpsing alien Earths, is
what motivates many of the people behind projects such as GPI
and SPHERE.
Macintosh had said as much during our conversations at
Gemini South: I see everything were doing now as steps along
the road toward a picture of another Earth. Someday we will
have that picture. If we finally get results on the fraction of small,
rocky planets that include really relevant thingswhich ones
have oceans, atmospheric oxygen, and so onand that number
turns out to be very tiny, well, thats probably pretty important. It
may make no practical difference to the progression of our civilization for a very long time, but philosophically, being able to say
that ours is the only place like this within 1,000 light-years, maybe that would cause us to try a little harder not to screw it up.
M O R E TO E X P L O R E

Exoplanet Detection Techniques. D

 ebra Fischer et al. in Protostars and Planets VI.
University of Arizona Press, 2014.
First Light of the Gemini Planet Imager. B ruce Macintosh et al. in P roceedings
of the National Academy of Sciences USA, Vol. 111, No. 35, pages 12,66112,666;
September 2, 2014.
SPHERE Science Verification. Bruno Leibundgut et al. in Messenger, No. 159,
pages 25; March 2015.
FROM OUR ARCHIVES

Searching for Life on Other Planets.J. Roger P. Angel and Neville J. Woolf; April 1996.
The Dawn of Distant Skies. M
 ichael D. Lemonick; July 2013.
s c i e n t i f i c a m e r i c a n . c o m /m a g a z i n e /s a

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