Telescopes at the Canary Observatories observe the occultation of star by Triton

Captura del vídeo de la ocultación de la estrella UCAC4 410-143659 por Tritón. Crédito: Sergio Velasco (IAC).
Captura del vídeo de la ocultación de la estrella UCAC4 410-143659 por Tritón. Crédito: Sergio Velasco (IAC).
Advertised on

On the night of 5th of October a star in the sky “was switched off”. Triton, the largest of the moons of Neptune, at some 4,500 million kilometres from the Earth passed in front of the star UCAC4 410-143659, briefly occulting it. It is not at all frequent that during their “cosmic passage” around the Sun, the planets and their satellites cross the line of sight to a distant star, but the telescopes of the Canary Island Observatories, among others, were able to point to the sky just when this occultation, which lasted 145 seconds, was taking place.

Its occultation was observed with diverse telescopes distributed all over the globe, including the SOFIA telescope, installed on board a NASA 747 aircraft. From the Teide Observatory (Izaña, Tenerife), the Carlos Sánchez telescope was used, and from the Roque de Los Muchachos Observatory (Garafía, La Palma), the Nordic Optical Telescope (NOT), the Jacobus Kapteyn Telescope (JKT) Telescopio Nazionale Gallileo (TNG), the Isaac Newton Telescope, from the ING Group of Telescopes, and the Gran Telescopio CANARIAS (GTC). The data collected will be useful to study the atmosphere of Triton by the light that crossed it as it passed in front of the star.

The IAC team of lucky imaging and adaptive optics observed with the FastCam instrument installed in the NOT, unique for its very high spatial resolution - details in objects very little separated in an image - and temporary - fastness with which it takes them - in the visible range. Using the 87,000 images of only 60 ms, a video of the occultation was realized in which it is observed on the left Neptune and on the right the star as the brightest point and Tritón like the weaker one.

News type
Press release
Scope
Observatorios de Canarias
General public
Communications media

It may interest you

  • Corriente gigante de Coma
    Press release
    A huge stream of stars is discovered in the Coma cluster
    An international team of scientists, with participation by researchers at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), has discovered a very large, but thin, stream of stars in the Coma cluster of galaxies. This is the largest stream of stars detected until now, and the first to be found in a cluster of galaxies. This finding, which is published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics, was made using observations taken with the William Herschel Telescope (WHT) at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory (Garafía, La Palma, Canary Islands). The Coma Cluster is a large cluster of galaxies
    Advertised on
  • Recreation of the landscape of the exoplanet Barnard b orbiting its star / Gabriel Pérez (IAC)
    Press release
    IAC scientists detect a ‘sub-Earth’ orbiting Barnard’s star, the nearest isolated star to the Sun
    The single star nearest to the Sun is called Barnard’s star. A team of researchers led by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), has recently detected a ‘sub-Earth’ orbiting it. This exoplanet, called Barnard b has at least half the mass of Venus and orbits rapidly around its star, so that its year lasts only a little over three Earth days. This new exoplanet is sixteen times nearer to Barnard’d star than Mercury is to the Sun, and has a surface temperature close to 125oC, so it does not have liquid water on its surface. This discovery, led by the IAC in collaboration with a number
    Advertised on
  • Illustration of the UNDARK project
    Press release
    The IAC aims to illuminate the dark side of the universe with the UNDARK project
    UNDARK is a pioneering project led by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) bringing together outstanding international institutions in the fields of astrophysics, cosmology, and particle physics. Funded for three years via the 'Widening' programme of the European Union, its objective is to tackle one of the major puzzles of contemporary physics: the dark universe. The major part of the Cosmos is composed by the so-called “dark universe”. Barely 18% of the total matter in the universe is made up of the elements in atoms with which we are familiar, while the remaining 82%, termed
    Advertised on