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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.
Yes, but what it proved was that the technique of detecting life worked. If you detect another world with similiar lifesigns, you can assume that carbon/water based life exists there.
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.
s/b: First Photo of Extra-Solar Planet?
Obviously if the Universe is on the order of 13B years old, the "first extra-solar planet" had long since been absorbed by the expansion of its star, then likely collapsed with the star into a brown dwarf.
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This headline and the linked photo are so completely absurd. Current telescopes still lack the power to resolve a star into anything more than a single point, let alone to a full size sphere which is capable of being eclipsed by a planet. Nowhere does the article mention anything about a photo. The picture in it is merely used to illustrate the concept of a planet.
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http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20011127/ts/space_ planet_atmosphere_dc_2.html
A test that succeeds on a sample of precisely one is hardly proven to work. If I find a three-legged cat, I can't claim that any three-legged animal is a cat, or that all cats have three legs. Similarly, if similar signs are found on another world, that doesn't necessarily mean that life exists there - nor does their absence prove that it doesn't.
Although I will concede that finding similar signs would indicate a possibility of life...
Or a massive alien invasion force from HD 209458...
Finding God in a Dog
Or a fleet of ships so massive that it pulls its own cloud of gasses behind it (from the exhaust trails).
Sure, it's most likely a planet, but you never know when that herd of horses you hear galloping over the next hill might be zebras. :) Such is the nature of probability...
Finding God in a Dog