When Christian Marois was a pre-schooler his mother made a pinhole shoebox viewer so he could watch a partial eclipse of the sun outside their home in northern Quebec. He remembers how excited he was to see the moon darken the sun.

“I had even more questions then, like why was the moon in the sky during the day?” he said from his office in the National Research Council (NRC) facility on Little Saanich Mountain. An astronomer with the Herzberg Institute for Astrophysics, Marois experienced a similar degree of excitement this year. While on a plane to Hawaii in July, Marois spotted a planet while examining survey images on his laptop of a star 130 light years away from Earth. 
It was the second planet he’d detected near the star. The first, detected with the Gemini North telesope in Hawaii, could be discounted as an aberration, Marois knew. The second planet, however, was undeniably the real thing.

“I was so excited, but I didn’t want to shout in the plane,” said Marois. “That would have been a bad thing, to shout on a plane, so I waited until I was in the rental car.”

The following night, Marois and a team of researchers took another look through the Keck telescope -- and found a third planet. They had confirmed with digital images a sight that had only been guessed at before: a star with orbiting planets in a solar system similar to Earth’s.

The three planets are massive, between seven to 10 times the mass of our Jupiter. They are about the same ratio of distance from their sun, HR8799, in the Pegasus constellation, as Neptune is from our sun, Marois says. They orbit their sun counter clockwise in time blocks from 100 to 450 years. HR8799 can be viewed faintly with the naked eye in Victoria in the southern sky at about 7 p.m. But to see the planets requires the assistance of the 10-meter-wide Keck and Canadian-made Gemini North telescopes that Marois used in Hawaii. “Kind of like a 10-meter wide digital camera,” he said. “A little hard to hold,” he added with a grin.

From a series of images taken with the telescopes, located on the extinct Mauna Kea volcano on the big island of Hawaii, Marois has been able to determine the three planets are also young, about 60 million years old. Too young to support life, he says. But these giant gassy planets, like our Jupiter, could be instrumental in helping life form on other, yet to be discovered nearby planets, he says.

“Jupiter had an important role in our system,” Marois says. “By cleaning up all the big rocks, by preventing a lot of bombardment on Earth, it allowed a stable environment in which life could appear.”

Marois, 34, is one year into a five-year contract with the NRC’s Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics in Saanich. All grown up now, there is still much of the inquisitive boy in the astronomer. “Everyone would like to find another Earth-like planet,” he said. “It’s important because you want to know if our solar system is unique.”

With finer-tuned technology currently being developed, Marois thinks an Earth-like planet could be discovered in the near future. “There are 400 billion stars in the Milky Way and we’re the example that we can happen, so why not elsewhere?”

vmoreau@saanichnews.com

Did you know?

n The Gemini North and Keck observations were possible due to adaptive optics systems that significantly reduce the blurring caused by Earth’s atmosphere, says the National Research Council. 
At Gemini North, the largest of Canada’s optical telescopes, the observations relied on an optics system designed and built by the NRC. In addition, the detection of all three planets was aided by an imaging strategy that allows the removal, after post-processing, of the host star’s light so that planets can be seen.