Slashdot Mirror
First Image Of Planet-Like Body Orbiting A Star
deglr6328 writes "The Gemini North Telescope has, for the first time, directly imaged a planet like body orbiting a star. The object is a brown dwarf, 55 to 78 times the mass of planet Jupiter and 14 AU distant from its parent star 15 Sge. It was imaged using adaptive optics(see also here) that correct for the blurring effect of the atmosphere using deformable mirrors. Cool!"
a Brown Dwarf is said to be Classified Less massive than stars but more massive than planets,
brown dwarfs. so.. at 78 times the size of jupiter how massive is massive? and how massive is it not massive compared to a star?
The More Knowledge you have the Luckier you Get- J.R. Ewing
Perhaps instead of thumping his Bible, he should have tried reading it before expressing his opinion. The book is silent on other planets and of course life on other planets, much less intelligent life on other planets.
Perhaps once could infer that there is no intelligent life on other planets based on theological complications with Jesus having to die for their sins too, but even that is speculation beyond what the book says.
The Bible has very little to say about scientific matters, despite what many theologians and Bible thumpers have decided up over the years. You would think people would have learned that making up stuff, claiming it was based on the Bible, and then getting trashed by the facts would have become unpopular since Galileo. BTW, the theoligians that disagreed with Galileo were following Aristotlean arguments not the Bible. Once again, the bible never says the earth was the center of the universe, etc. The Bible mentions the sun rising, etc. and people have inferred that the earth is at the center becuase of such language -- however, this is merely descriptive of the apparent sunrise, I can even read the sunrise & sunset times in the morning paper, and I am pretty sure that publisher know that earth orbits the sun, and the sun-rise is simply appearance, not a literal sun-rise.
Back to topic
Let's face it, the ability to directly image anything outside the solar system is pretty amazing. It was not very long ago that Betelgeuse was imaged as the first star (as a disk, not a point source).
There are some very interesting large-baseline telescopes that have been proposed that would theoretically allow imaging details of planets in other solar systems, alas they budget for such projects may be some time in coming.
It's still a long way to the nearest star. With current tech, would be be very lucky to get a large ship moving at 1 percent light speed, so we will have to settle for pictures for some time to come. Where is Zephran Cochran when you need him?
adaptive optics have the ablity to create images at the same resolution of the Huble space telescope. I wonder what this means for it's future. Seems kinda pointless now.
( I submitted an artical about it to slashdot a month or so ago, but it was rejected..)
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Well, an important thing to understand is that this discovery is not a "picture" of the planet or the star in the traditional sense, in that you cannot see details on the surface of either the planet or star. That possibility is simply way beyond any telescope technology we currently have, and will continue to be for quite some time.
If you take a look at the original image released (in the CNN story), the point is that the scientists were able to see the planet separately from the star, on its own, for the first time. Up until now, it has generally only been inferred that those planets exist, based on the wobble of the parent star, or appearance/disappearance of elements in the spectrum.
Both the star and the planet are point objects. There is no detail you can see on either, even though they seem to have "diameter". This is just diffraction at work.