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Photo of First Extra-Solar Planet?
Anonymous Coward writes "According to NASA 'A major discovery from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope about a planet outside our Solar System will be announced in a Space Science Update on 27 November. The discovery marks an important new capability in efforts to uncover secrets about these newly discovered extrasolar planets.' Given the names of the individuals listed as speakers at this event, plus previous press releases and published papers, it is likely that the topic of discussion will focus upon planet(s) circling the sunlike star HD 209458."
That would prove that it is a planet. There is also a new technique that uses the light of the star, to access the chemistry of a planet's atmosphere. This would be a most effective use for the Hubble Space telescope which is free of earth's atmospheric mess. With the spectrographic technique the Cassini space craft was able to prove that Earth has life. This is the same technique they want to try with extrasolar planets.
The planets found so far are all in Jupiter's mass-class and all of them are in close orbits around the parent star. This makes it more likely that they are 'dud'-stars in a double star system, where one of the members did not attract enough mass to start thermonuclear reactions.
The techniques used to detect these giant planets in close orbit would at present not be able to detect the earth over interstellar instances. Likely not even Jupiter would be detected. This is good news, as there could be literally thousands of earth like planets within 100 light years, as we would be unable to detect them.
To be able to see earth like planets at earth like distances from their parent star, would require a much more advanced telescope than Hubble. The ideal place for this telescope would be on the far side of the moon, which could shield it from visible as well as infrared light from earth and the sun (50 % of the time). As the moon is also geologically very quiet compared to earth better performance would be achieved. This is further augmented by the lower moon gravity which would make it possible to produce stable telescopes with a mirror-diameter larger than 6 meters, which seems to be the maximum here on earth for one-piece mirrors.
Well enough said about this. Applaud to NASA for doing something worthwhile.
Yours Yazeran
Plan: To go to Mars one day with a hammer.