Possible First Photo Of Extra-Solar Planet

dtolman writes "Space.com is reporting that the first direct image of an extra-solar planet may have been made using a new technique with the Hubble telescope. Confirmation will be made in the next few months by reimaging the star, and seeing if the planet candidate has actually changed in its orbital position."

Comments

Re:Hubble!

[Radical Rad]

And to think, with all the advancements that Hubble is making, they still want to decommission the thing.

Maybe they are suggesting decommisioning the Hubble for the same reason that schools often cut extracurricular sports first when budgets get tight. If it is something people care about, they will cough up the money. Hubble is fantastic but expensive to operate and they might have to cut dozens of smaller programs to equal the savings from mothballing it. Joe Sixpack certainly wouldn't agree to pay for all those other programs but he might be willing to pay for just one especially since he gets cool wallpapers for his desktop from it.

According to this article Hubble has cost about 2B plus about 2B more in operating costs while its replacement will supposedly cost a total of about 1.2 B. Of course, when is the last time something came in under budget? But even a savings of just a couple billion adds up to a lot of science that can be done elsewhere. 2B or not 2B? That is the question. (couldn't resist)

Re:Hubble!

[captainktainer]

Maybe they are suggesting decommisioning the Hubble for the same reason that schools often cut extracurricular sports first when budgets get tight

Pardon me... but what schools are you speaking of? At least in Florida, the first things they cut are sciences and arts; extracurricular sports are the last to go. Even when they can't afford classrooms for all of the students, they still build new stadiums.

Hubble is our most powerful telescope... and while telescopic observations aren't exactly going to bring about a revolution in telecommunications, if we're going to study the heavens, planet-watching strikes me as a damned good goal.

Re:Hubble!

[Anonymous Coward]

I think he was referring to school districts with halfway intelligent board members.

Re:Not that interesting (?)

[snake_dad]

Are you kidding? Until recently it was not even possible to resolve a star as a disc (with the exception of that yellow thing that's supposed to be in the sky during the day), and now, possibly, we see, not detect, a planet outside our own solar system for the first time! As the article says, this is at the limit of current technology, so no wonder it is hard to detect. What did you expect? Beautiful pictures of weather patterns? Volcanos?

It is sad to see that even here, buried in the science section, people can be so casual and dismissive about what could become one of the biggest break-throughs in astronomy.

Re:Not that interesting (?)

[Satai]

Not true. I've seen Debes' photos, and I'm sure if you dig hard enough you can find them as well. What they look like is a central star that has been removed (some artifacts remain) with a spike in signal some distance away. The planet may not be resolved to any real detail, but that doesn't detract from the fact that it's a direct imaging.

Re:Naming conventions

[nimblebrain]

*laugh* The star name + letter combination will have to do for the meantime. The roman numeral convention assumes that we know all the planets in a star system, so Earth being Sol III and Mars being Sol IV is just grand for us.

For jolly gas giants around far stars, though, we don't know whether there are any other planets in orbit, or at the very least, we don't know how many other planets there are. Someone observing our system with the equivalent of our current technology wouldn't even be able to discern Jupiter or Saturn.

When we somehow (and I'd love to see how!) manage to figure out an entire remote planetary system, perhaps we'll switch back to roman numerals :)

Celestia keeps relatively up to date with discovered extrasolar planets, and it uses the star + letter convention. Obviously, though, the planet texture used when you go visit the planet is merely a guess :)