With fellow co-PI Daniella Bardalez Gagliuffi, I planned and took the first coronagraphic images of the nearby exoplanet 14 Herculis c, one of the coldest and oldest gas giants imaged to date. The planet orbits on a wide, elliptical path that is misaligned with the inner planet in the system, 14 Herculis b. This is a wildly different architecture compared to our own solar system, where all the (large) planets orbit in the same orbital plane, and are aligned with the Sun’s rotation axis. This indicates that the two planets in the 14 Herculis system underwent a gravitational tug of war at some point in their history, and that the outer planet was kicked onto its present orbit in a process called “planet-planet scattering.” The planet is a lot fainter in the 4.4 micron filter than we expected, based on how massive and old it is, so we believe that strong updrafts are cycling opaque gases from the planet’s warm interior into its upper atmosphere, where some of its outbound light is blocked from our view. You can read our press release here. The paper was published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, and you can find a pre-print of the article here.