Hubble Snaps Photo of Extrasolar Planet

iamlucky13 writes "Space.com has reported that a Hubble Space Telescope photo supports with a very high degree of confidence that a picture taken by the European Space Observatory does indeed show an extrasolar planet. As many readers know, planets outside our solar system are typically found by watching for wobbles in a star's orbit or for dimming caused by the planet crossing in front of its star. The ESO and Hubble images would represent the 1st and 2nd times that planets outside our solar system have been directly detected. The planet is about 5 times as massive as Jupiter and orbits a brown dwarf a little farther out than Pluto orbits our own sun."

Comments

Minor correction

[Anonymous Coward]

The ESO is the European Southern Observatory, not Space Observatory.

Re:Minor correction

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe someone was thinkg about European Space Agency (ESA).

Re:Minor correction

[myom]

In Europe the hot chicks work AT the space obseravtories and other labs. :D

Re:Minor correction

[dearreid]

And what, exactly, is a "Comapanion"? Look at the picture... I think they mean "companion". Scientists can't spell.

Re:Minor correction

[Cy Guy]

And what, exactly, is a "Comapanion"? Look at the picture... I think they mean "companion". Scientists can't spell.

Oh they can spell. They just can't type.

Sounds like

[JJ]

. . . not so much like Vulcan as a failed binary star system.

Still if we can get pictures of something five times bigger than Jupiter at this distance . . .

Re:Sounds like

[DeathByDuke]

Still if we can get pictures of something five times bigger than Jupiter at this distance . . .

Imagine a upgraded Hubble or Hubble II.... the implications of photographing and analysing planets and their atmospheres (by measuring the light sprectrum or even photographing it) could be enormous. Imagine one snapping a Earth type.

Though it'd give fire to the people opposing interstellar travel ('why go there and waste a lot of money when we can photograph it safely from here?'). At least we'd be able to handpick targets for future interstellar probes, rather than firing them blindly at a star and possibly getting nothing. I am hugely fascinated by this, and it shows the value of Hubble and why we must keep it, and the design itself.

Re:Sounds like

[RazzleFrog]

Are there really that many people who oppose interstellar travel? Wouldn't we have to prove it is feasible first before people really started worrying about the cost? We haven't even figured out how to get to Mars and back in a reasonable fashion yet.

Re:Sounds like

[DeathByDuke]

and still people moan and worry about the costs and risks of that.... theres always some. It'll just take some convincing to sway them that its a good idea (or actually doing it). And the money and risk is worth it. Some people oppose the idea of travelling around through paranoia. What if we meet aliens? Will they be hostile? What if a ship picks up a contagion? etc etc. Ah well. If it happens, it happens.

Re:Sounds like

[stupidfoo]

Imagine a upgraded Hubble or Hubble II....

Forgot what series it was (I think it was some six part BBC series) but the idea is to have a satellite array out in space, similar to how they have ground based arrays. They would be aligned via laser. They made it sound like this was something that was going to be done sometime around 2015, or so.

The implications were that they would then be able to see earth sized planets directly, and possibly even be able to analyze the atmosphere of the planet.

Re:Sounds like

[AviLazar]

If they can gaurantee me an atmosphere to breathe - as the saying goes "Beam me up Scotty" - I wanna go. It would be an adventure of a lifetime. Yea I would spend years in space - but the end result might just be worth it (especially if they create a big enough space ship that contains the population of a small town). Ok this sounds geeky and far fetched - but why not? The only thing stopping us is greed and fear.

Re:Sounds like

[VanillaCoke420]

There's a much greater risk for a lot more people if we continue developing new ways to kill as many of us as possible, than if we decide to go to the stars. But that's just me.

Re:Sounds like

[Ayaress]

Assuming you live to see the result (short trip/hibernation) and don't just end up living in a much more cramped version of any given city on Earth for the rest of your life.

Re:Sounds like

[anagama]

• There's a much greater risk for a lot more people if we continue developing new ways to kill as many of us as possible, than if we decide to go to the stars. But that's just me.

All those movies where Earth faces attack by aliens with superior technology? Maybe it is humans who will be those evildoers someday.

Still, building a better hubble would be cool. I would love to see the pictures.

Re:Sounds like

[AviLazar]

hence an atmosphere i can breath. If i can survive in the outdoors of this planet I won't have to worry about living in a tiny little sanctuary.

Re:Sounds like

[gl4ss]

there's people who oppose fucking everything. :)

or maybe they think that they'll live forever. judge from the past 1000 years and think what stuff we might have 1000 years from now.. I'd leave worrying to the later generations with the actual tech to maybe do something.

Re:Sounds like

[marcus]

I think he was remarking on the possibility that you might die before you get there. In other words,

Current_Technology + Interstellar_Travel = A_VERY_Long_Time

Where A_VERY_Long_Time is on the order of decades or even centuries.

Re:Sounds like

[VanillaCoke420]

I worry that as we're going into space we will bring along our weapons and the attitude to go with them.

There are telescopes in the making/planning, such as JWST, Terrestrial Planet Finder and Darwin.

Re:Sounds like

[DeathByDuke]

The thing is, theres a snag with those upcoming telescopes. None of those can do visible light like Hubble.

Re:Sounds like

[lightknight]

And I'm sure that the alien races we will encounter will not have their own conflicts. It's one of those things with free will: everybody is rowing in their own direction. The only way to get everyone rowing in the same direction, all the time, is to have a hive infrastructure.

Re:Sounds like

[eggoeater]

....five times bigger than Jupiter...

It's not five times bigger (in volume), it's five times more massive. Gas giants can't get much bigger than Jupiter. Add more mass and they just get more dense. (Stars are large not because of mass but because fusion pushes out from the center. )

Re:Sounds like

[Anonymous Coward]

Superficially, it would be boring. I mean, how exciting is a stroll in the jungle, for Christ's sake. The romance of interstellar flight is an illusion (IMHO).

That being said, I'd go in a flash if I could.

Re:Sounds like

[ceeam]

Me, I oppose going to Mars from anywhere except from the Moon colony. See - for the last 30(?) years the man has NOT broken off the Earth orbit, right? So, let's send three or four people to Mars, ok, what the f...g big deal? Are we going to be happy about it for the next 100 years or what? Gosh, the planets are only an economical engine away - we kinda have everything else I guess. Why should we do that? For once - so that we don't _constantly_, even if _subconsciously_ live in the fear that it takes only a couple of madmen getting pissed off to annihilate thousands of years of our civilazition existing in this world.

Re:Sounds like

[Anonymous Coward]

There is the Darwin project to see earth-like planets and analyze the electromagnetic spectrum to determine the atmosphere composition.

Re:Sounds like

[VanillaCoke420]

True, we will not see the planets in what to us is visible light, but it's possible that TPF and Darwin could directly see the planets.

Re:Sounds like

[VanillaCoke420]

But we don't need to form a hive society in order not to throw rocks at each other.

Re:Sounds like

[twiddlingbits]

Hubble is going to be replaced (assuming NASA get's it act together) with the James Webb Space Telescope. It will live out at L-2 about 1.5Million Km from earth. See http://www.jwst.nasa.gov/ for more. I just hope it gets there before HST dies. IIRC, the HST "rescue" mission has been cancelled as too risky for the STS and too expensive for robotic technology.

Re:Sounds like

[norsk_hedensk]

"The only thing stopping us is greed and fear." stopping us from achieving this goal, and so many others....solving world hunger etc etc.

Re:Sounds like

[Anonymous Coward]

The only thing stopping us is greed and fear.

*smacks head* Of course! All we have to do is get rid of greed and fear, and away we go!

Re:Sounds like

[autophile]

Imagine a upgraded Hubble or Hubble II--

Forget that! Imagine a Beowulf cluster of-- (POW! Thud.)

--Rob

Re:Sounds like

[AviLazar]

I think this is out of scope...we can always say "well yea this problem is important, but we shouldn't worry about it because of another problem." There are many people in this world, and we do not have to concentrate on the same problem (duh).

Given that - we do have enough resources out there - except people are greedy, spoiled, and rotten. If we slashed our military fund by 10% and used that towards other programs - we would still be the #1 army in the world able to squelch anything that moves, and would be able to solve a TON of more problems.
Unfortunately we love to spend money on war toys even when it is over costly...and as for greed - well we have poor money management skills in our gov't that gets exploited by gov't contractors.
Our #1 problem is to cut costs by telling these gov't contractors to shape up or ship out followed by reducing the gov't money stealing. Some may argue - but this is my mindset - with money we can accomplish anything. Save some money here, and spend it somewhere else and the results would be astounding.

Re:Sounds like

[dbacher]

Terrestial Planet Finder is supposed to be this kind of a mission. NASA is talking about an array of space telescopes placed well outside of earth's orbit that would be collectively able to take a picture of a planet the earth's size or smaller directly.

Re:Sounds like

[fred9653]

Sounds like: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_(ESA) ESA's Darwin or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrestrial_Planet_Fi nder NASA's Terrestrial Planet Finder

Re:Sounds like

[Tablizer]

Are there really that many people who oppose interstellar travel? Wouldn't we have to prove it is feasible first before people really started worrying about the cost? We haven't even figured out how to get to Mars and back in a reasonable fashion yet.

I hear some religious sects might spend the money on their own, and accept the risk. The Mormans could possibly afford such. It would probably have to be a multi-generational nuclear-powered ship because anything faster than about 1/10 the speed of light is probably beyond our practical reach right now.

Re:Sounds like

[master_p]

Well, the Earth spends more than 5 billion dollars every day for its armies. If only 10% of these money was directed to space travel research...

Re:Sounds like

[Anonymous Coward]

. . . not so much like Vulcan as a failed binary star system.

Or the system in Asimov's Nemesis, except of course, this one is 225LY away, as opposed to 2.5. And well, it has no satellites that we know of yet. hoo.

Re:Sounds like

[M1FCJ]

That money doesn't dissapear from the economy. Think this way: America is the biggest weapons manufacturer on earth by a large margin. Most probably at least %20 of the total expenditure is spent on buying American weapons from American companies. That's 1 billion per day, at least and probably more because USA alone spends over 380 billion in a year. Americans get rich, rest of the earth gets poorer.

Re:Sounds like

[M1FCJ]

Who cares about visible light? Most of the interesting stuff is in the infra-red region because you can see through dust-clouds. As if the visible light pictures of Hubble are true colour...

Re:Sounds like

[esaloch]

How about a Hubble beowulf cluster.

Re:Sounds like

[EinarTh]

It was 'Space with Sam Neil', a BBC documentary in 6 episodes.. quite nice, actually. Available at any descent bitTorrent, dc++, kazaa, etc. network near you.

Re:Sounds like

[Anonymous Coward]

Being more rational with the money and spending it on space also doesn't mean that it just disappears.

It just means that US government corporate welfare / tax payer pork goes towards exploring space, and not blowing up people.

I think military spending is just more convenient, because it's easier to scare the tax payers into being harvested if they can scare the heck out of them (the commies are coming! So are the drug lords! Buy my aircraft carrier! Think of the children! Commies eat children for breakfast!). Space, well, you actually have to excite people about exploration, which is harder (sadly) than convincing people that some or other country needs to be blown up (for whatever reason du jour).

Re:Sounds like

[M1FCJ]

Maybe we can put a new spin on this. What about Green Aliens will eat your kids!! or Martians are coming!

Re:Sounds like

[JJ]

Well according to the article, ". . . The planet candidate is about 1.5 times the diameter of Jupiter and about five times as massive. . ."

So I guess that means the disk is about 2.25 times bigger than Jupiter's. Pi are squared and all that.

Re:Sounds like

[Anonymous Coward]

Pies aren't square, they are round!! Eveyone knows that...sheesh.

fuck you, someone had to say it.

Re:Sounds like

[Digi-John]

At the risk of being offensive, I'm going to ask: Do you really want the Mormons, or any other religious organization, to colonize Mars? All is fine and dandy until they claim the planet as their own and force everyone visiting to convert :-)

I don't know who I'd trust to start a colony, maybe a really trustworthy organization or company.

Re:Sounds like

[jhamm]

The planet is not 5 times bigger than Jupiter, it has 5 times as much mass as Jupiter. Its diameter is only 1.5 times larger than Jupiter's.

Re:Sounds like

[Feztaa]

there's people who oppose fucking everything. :)

I oppose fucking everything. Some things simply were not meant to be fucked.

Re:Sounds like

[Dabido]

"I oppose fucking everything. Some things simply were not meant to be fucked"

But people who will F*** everything have an easier chance of getting a date on a Saturday.

Admittedly it is probably with an inanimate object, but who are we to critisize a person who wants to stick their doodle in soemthing ... say a vat of acid ... um .. ow!!!!

At least it will remove them from the gene pool. :-)

Re:Sounds like

[lightknight]

Maybe. But given the entire length of human history, when has some part of the human race not thrown rocks at another part? There's always conflict, and of that conflict, some part is throwing rocks.

grainy!

[dioscaido]

how many megapixels does the hubble have?

Re:grainy!

[Anonymous Coward]

"2 butted 2048 × 4096, 15 m/pixel CCD detectors"

So it is 16MP for the wide field camera, less for others.

Re:grainy!

[Agent Orange]

it's not all about pixels. The HST CCDs are "scientific" grade chips, which means they are MUCH lower in noise, bad pixels etc than your average digital camera. These requirements also make the chips hellishly expensive, since the yield of good chips is very low.

For a normal camera, there are gobs and gobs of photons all over the place. the HST CCDs routinely deal with only a handful of photons (1000s), so the requirements of low-noise are much more stringent.

There Were Klingons Around...

[Dagny Taggert]

...ahh, never mind.

Re:There Were Klingons Around...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, dude. Learn to wipe your ass!!

Its always such a disapointment

[Timesprout]

when you see these photos. I know its a tremendous achievement but when you see a whole planet and it still looks like a little pixelated blob then its hard to match the achievement to what you are actually viewing.

Re:Its always such a disapointment

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, the MTV generation has come of age... When I was young, we'd look at a little pixelate blob and get all excited about the green aliens that would spew out of that blob and cross the galaxies in their weird organic spaceships and invade our sweet planet, enslaving everybody (and not just the commies either), just because we dared point our telescopes at them.

Nowadays, the kids look at a blob and say "yeah but there's still no proof of any extra-terrestrial life, and even if there was some, it'll take them centuries to travel to Earth, and even then they'd most likely be peaceful..." boring!

Re:Its always such a disapointment

[VanillaCoke420]

Actually for me it's the opposite. I know that there was a time, during my own lifetime (and I'm just 27) when astronomers couldn't detect exoplanets by any means, even indirect means. And now finally... we get a tiny glimpse of an exoplanet for the first time. For me it's amazing to think that we finally have that technology to actually see something so tiny that is so far away. I think that it's the fact that it's just a few pixels that makes it the more fantastic, that is, it's on the edge of our technological horizon. And I know it will get better, and fast too. Within a few decades we will be able to see Earth sized planets, I am sure of it. This is truly something to celebrate!

Re:Its always such a disapointment

[the_mad_poster]

MTV generation indeed. A generation I'm part of and disgusted by, in large part.

Part of the problem, of course, is that NASA takes 80 billion photos of large, interstellar objects like massive galaxies, none of which actually show the large object as it actually appears (or, in most cases, DOESN'T appear). Then, they combine all their infrared and this radiation that radiation images into one big, purty, inaccurate public "photo" that makes everyone go "ooooh ahhhh" when, in fact, the object actually looks nothing like the photo the press was given.

Then, when people see the real pictures they go "what the hell is this pixelated blob? If this planet is so big and so close [relative to the aforementioned large object] why can't I see little green men waving to me on it?"

Re:Its always such a disapointment

[Twanfox]

Considering the distances involved, I'm suprised we get anything distinct enough at such distances to even be recognizable as a sphere. I mean, think about it.

Light travels 184,282.4 miles/sec.
This system is 225 light years away
That puts this system at a physical distance of 22 trillion miles (roughly).

Close is relative. We can't yet see a quark, but it would take that same kind of magnification power in order to see the surface of another planet from here. And that's likely a best case situation. Guess what happens when you have all manner of crap in the way, such as dust clouds, micro black holes (if they exist), normal black holes, stars in close proximity to our line of sight, or other garbage we don't yet know about? It distorts the image pretty badly.

Eventually, we'll probably figure out some way to do it. For now, though, be content with solving the question of "are there really other planets out there?" (should be a 'duh' answer, but apparently it isn't to those that need proof or have blind faith we are in some way unique in this universe)

Re:Its always such a disapointment

[gstoddart]

when you see these photos. I know its a tremendous achievement but when you see a whole planet and it still looks like a little pixelated blob then its hard to match the achievement to what you are actually viewing.

Wow! I know it's not exactly a HDTV picture and doesn't match special effects. But wer're talking about imaging something that's 225 light years away.

Isn't that sorta like reading microfiche from space or something? (I have no idea how close of an analogy that is because the scales boggle my mind.)

I'm always blown away by the kind of things that HUbble actually can do. A little film-grain from that distance seems acceptable to me.

Cheers

Re:Its always such a disapointment

[Dekks]

I think they meant more to the lay person its hard to imagine, to scientists and geeks it possibly conjures up images of this huge brown planet with swirling gases around the atmosphere, and how amazing it is that something thats trillions of miles, more distance than can be imagined can still be snapped by this man made telescope in space. But to people like me who are interested in science but have no real background or knowledge of just whats involved, it does just appear like a small blob and its hard to imagine it as anything else. And this is from someone who's father worked in hubble (a very minor part of it) and several ESA projects.

Re:Its always such a disapointment

[sconeu]

You're off by 2 orders of magnitude.

225 light years * 6 trillion miles/lightyear = 135 quadrillion miles.

Re:Its always such a disapointment

[sconeu]

And I was off by 2 orders as well. Itranscribed from my pen and paper calcs badly.

That's 1.35 quadrillion.

Re:Its always such a disapointment

[Tablizer]

Part of the problem, of course, is that NASA... combine all their infrared and this radiation that radiation images into one big, purty, inaccurate public "photo" that makes everyone go "ooooh ahhhh" when, in fact, the object actually looks nothing like the photo the press was given.

To be fair, NASA usually describes the process that was used to create a given image, but other publications copy the image witout including all the specifics. Is it NASA's fault that all the caveats are removed?

Re:Its always such a disapointment

[Tablizer]

but other publications copy the image witout including all the specifics. Is it NASA's fault that all the caveats are removed?

I was thinking. Maybe big telescopes should have a warning sticker that reads:

WARNING: Objects in primary mirror are further
than they appear in NASA photos, are are really
grey and boring to the human eye, which can
only see colors in the visable spectrum instead
of all the other wavelengths we add to photos
to make them pretty, informative, interesting,
and are damn great PR to help grow NASA's budget.

Re:Its always such a disapointment

[wass]

I don't get it, are you complaining about NASA's PR department as it affects gen-X'ers? Are you suggesting that all photos NASA provides to the press and the public be an array of 'boring' greyscale images with their associated filter response functions? So then people won't be misled by false color, and will know what to expect when they see the raw data?

Speaking of the PR photos, how many astronomers do you think their colorized photos hay have inspired at a young age (or any age) throughout the decades? Is it worthwhile to colorize a photo to increase public appreciation of astronomy? Or do you really think that's being insincere?

Anwyay, have you ever shaved, combed your hair, applied deodorant, brushed your teeth, and worn nice clothes? If so you're just as guilty of what you accuse NASA of by presenting a facade to the public that doesn't accurately reflect how your unkempt au natural body really is.

Re:Its always such a disapointment

[M1FCJ]

This saturday I had a look at M33 with my binoculars because I was far too lazy to get the telescope out while I was shooting for Comet Machholz. It doesn't look anything like this picture. Are my eyes defective?

As a general thumb of rule, you can assume almost anything that's astronomy related is not true colour. Using filters always give you more information because each filter only allow a single information through (i.e., amount of Oxygen, Nitrogen, Hydrogen). Then you can look at the picture and say "oooh, I have lots of atomic O here, I wonder why" and etc. :)

Re:Its always such a disapointment

[M1FCJ]

Err, I regularly photograph objects more than 1 thousand light years !!! away but I never thought it is such a big achievement! :-)

On the other hand, they managed to photograph something as pale, unbright.. arghh... what's the word... damn.

Re:Its always such a disapointment

[Tablizer]

The only thing I have ever seen in a telescope that lived up to expectations is the moon. If you look at it during a quarter phase, you see all the craggly craters in glorious detail. Saturn is fun because you can see the rings, but still you don't see much detail beyond that.

The fascination of the telescope view is that you are looking at the real thing. If you really expect Hubble-like image views, then your scope is probably ebay-bound. There is also a kind of hunting nature to it in finding stuff. That is why those new-fangled auto-lookup scopes take a lot of the fun out of it. Plus, they require too much calibration everytime you take the scope out.

Re:Its always such a disapointment

[M1FCJ]

I myself like looking through the telescope. I've been an active amateur astronomer for quite some time. OTOH, I always had trouble with people looking through my telescope and feeling crestfallen.

I don't like the GOTO-like telescopes, they take the fun out of amateur astronomy. If I want to see pretty pictures at a click, I'd use internet. :)

Re:Its always such a disapointment

[BeerCat]

I was just about to post that! I was too lazy to use pen and paper, so called up the Mac's calculator to do teh sums. I then noticed a "Speak Total" option, which I thought would merely read out the numbers ("one three ...."), but actually read it out fully ("one quadrillion, three hundred and twenty two trillion...")*. Well, I was impressed.


* c=186,200 miles per sec
186,200 *60 *60 *24 *365.25 *225 = 1,322,105,652,000,000

Re:Its always such a disapointment

[Anonymous Coward]

You make good points sometimes, and then the rest of the time you're an asshole. Actually, you're always an asshole, even when making good points. It's kind of sad.

Re:Its always such a disapointment

[Twanfox]

I must've missed converting minutes to seconds when I shifted the speed of light from miles/sec to miles/year. Probably a good thing I didn't go into physics as I originally planned.

Re:Its always such a disapointment

[some guy I know]

have you ever shaved, combed your hair, applied deodorant, brushed your teeth, and worn nice clothes?

No.

Probability

[asliarun]

From the article:-
"University of Arizona astronomer Glenn Schneider, who led the new study, said he's 99.1 percent sure the object is in orbit around the brown dwarf."

How does one calculate the probability of accuracy and arrive at an exact figure like 99.1%? I mean, isn't this self-contradictory, or am i missing something?

Re:Probability

[Kjella]

I presume they took their data, and from that created a probability cone of where it was going, not unlike the recent comet thing. And of that probability cone, 99,1% would lead to an orbit around the brown dwarf.

If I have a random number between 0 and 100 (probability cone), I can be 99,1% sure it'll be within 0 and 99,1 (in orbit). I assume they can pretty exactly determine the "band" in which objects would stay in orbit.

Re:Probability

[arodland]

The science of statistics is basically all about saying how sure you are about things. For example, "given this set of data from the sample group, there's a 95% chance that the mean number of slashdotters per household worldwide lies between 0.15 and 0.23," or "Given these sets of measured position and velocity vectors, and their uncertainties, there is an 0.23% chance that object X's path will intersect with the earth's in the year 2038."

So perhaps they've taken a number of (extremely lo-res, I'm sure) measurements of the path of body X around star Y, and found that given the degree of certainty of their measurements, then there's a 99.1% chance that body X's velocity is consistent with orbit, but an 0.9% chance that all the errors stacked up the wrong way and it's really just speeding by in a hyperbolic orbit or something like that.

Re:Probability

[asliarun]

Thanks.

It does make sense now.

Re:Probability

[Cyberax]

Don't you know that 58% of statistics are made up?

Re:Probability

[LMCBoy]

This is the kind of silliness that results when astronomers talk to the press.

Among ourselves, astronomers will talk about how many "sigma" a detection is, referring to how far above the Gaussian noise the signal is. A 1-sigma detection is real 68% of the time. 2-sigma detections are real 95% of the time, 3-sigma data are 99.7% sure, etc. So, Glenn is just saying that the hypothesis that the brown dwarf and its candidate companion are actually moving together in space is supported by the data above the errors by about 2.5 sigma or so. With further observations, the errors will shrink, and it will then be above three sigma (assuming the hypothesis is correct).

But, Glenn can't talk about "sigmas" to the press, because, sadly, not everyone knows the wonders of the Gaussian normal distribution. So he does a quick conversion to probabilities for the press release. BTW, it is indeed possible to characterize errors to the tenth of a percent, especially when you are close to 100% confidence.

Get ready for more astronomy-related news this week; our annual society meeting (AAS) is taking place in San Diego.

Re:Probability

[SmokeHalo]

Easy. He thought of 1000 different permutations of the situation, and 991 of them involve the object orbiting the brown dwarf.

Re:Probability

[asliarun]

Please bear with me if i'm off-base here.

I can understand if someone gives an exact figure on the accuracy of a measurement. For example, if i measure 1cm with a normal ruler (with 1mm markings), i can say that my measurement was accurate upto 1mm. However, can i really say that i'm 90% sure of my ruler measurement? It doesn't make sense because a figure like 90% signifies probability and not accuracy.

In fact, even if we take probability, say a coin toss, it doesn't hold true. I can say that the probability of getting a "heads" is 50%. However, i cannot say that i'm 50% sure of getting a "heads". The statement doesn't make sense because there's a subtle difference. I'm now quantifying my level of surety (91%) instead of assigning a quality to it (no chance in hell, slightly sure, extremely sure). Giving a highly accurate number to surety does not convey any meaning (at least to the lay person). Most people subconsciously convert a 90% accuracy into "very sure" and a 99% accuracy into "almost dead sure". However, a figure like 91% doesn't add any more value over a figure like 90%.

Re:Probability

[LMCBoy]

I can understand if someone gives an exact figure on the accuracy of a measurement. For example, if i measure 1cm with a normal ruler (with 1mm markings), i can say that my measurement was accurate upto 1mm. However, can i really say that i'm 90% sure of my ruler measurement? It doesn't make sense because a figure like 90% signifies probability and not accuracy.

Yes, you can say "I am 90% sure of my measurement", because when you say a measurement has a precision of 1 mm, that's really a shorthand for something more complex. It is not as if the "true" length of the object can be anything within +/- 1 mm and cannot possibly ever be outside that interval; rather, a distribution of repeated measurements would follow a Gaussian curve (centered on the true length) whose characteristic width is 1 mm. You cannot ever measure something to infinite precision, and so measurement is inherently probabilistic.

I'll illustrate with your example. Let's say you have a theoretical hypothesis that you'd like to test by making a measurement. The hypothesis is: "these two pieces of string are exactly the same length".

You have a ruler which you can calibrate by repeatedly measuring some object whose length is known, and doing so demonstrates that the ruler has a precision of +/- 1 mm. However, as I said, this doesn't mean that you will *always* measure within 1 mm of the "true" length, nor does it mean that it is equally likely to measure any value within +/- 1 mm.

The +/- precision value means that if you measure an object to be X mm long, the probability that the true length is within the interval (X-1, X+1) is 68%. The probability that the true length is within (X-2, X+2) is 95%. The probability that the true length is within (X-3, X+3) is 99%. That's the definition of the "+/-" values attached to all measurements (including M.o.E. on polls and surveys).

So, you measure the length of the first string to be 12 mm, and the length of the second string to be 14 mm. They differ by 2 mm, which is twice the measurement precision, which means we have excluded the hypothesis that they are the same length at the 95% confidence level (which means that if you repeatedly measured the length of two strings which really did have exactly the same length, you would find a 2 mm difference only 5% of the time).

Re:Probability

[Anonymous Coward]

brown dwarf? beteljeuse? Howard Stern? What?!

Re:Probability

[asliarun]

Thank you for the excellent explanation.

Re:Probability

[Anonymous Coward]

Duh, 75% of all people know that.

Headline

[truthsearch]

You gotta love the Register's headline for this story: "Extra-solar planet snapped by galactic paparazzi". I supposed they are looking at a big star, but... Anyway, gave me a chuckle.

Re:Headline

[Ours]

I still prefer the subtitle to the headline: "Kinda blurry". At least it got my hopes to see a nice picture down a notch before looking at the pilexated mess that represents the planet. Well, maybe I should still have lowered my expectations. What can Can't expect much at this distances.

Re:Headline

[goldspider]

One has to appreciate the irony of the Register, barely a tabloid rag at best, refering to anyone as "paparazzi".

Re:Headline

[T-Kir]

Naa, the blur is there to make the planet look artificially younger... you know, iron out all those wrinkles and signs of its real age. ;-)

Re:Headline

[Tablizer]

You gotta love the Register's headline for this story: "Extra-solar planet snapped by galactic paparazzi".

The Brits can't get over the Princess Diana thing. I suppose they will start blaming supernova on civilizations crashing planets while running from intergalactic paparizzi :-)

Re:Headline

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, I don't know, I think I can see an outline of South America.

5 times as massive? isn't it supposed to implode?

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to think that if Jupiter was any bigger, it would collapse under its own gravity to form a small star.

Something called the 'chandra limit' I think.

Any body with gyan on that?

oh.. 'gyan' in Sanskrit means 'knowledge/wisdom'..roughly..

Re:5 times as massive? isn't it supposed to implod

[Dagny Taggert]

I believe that the body has to be much, much larger than that...something on the order of 50 times larger than Jupiter.

High degree of confidence

[Jarlsberg]

I took a photo on a beach this holiday, and I can with a high degree of confidence say I spotted something that looked like a girl in the distance. (I think she was running away though.)

Ok, so mod me off topic. :P

Anyways, it's hard to get excited about this. I mean, it's just a few pixels on a grainy image. I know I should be excited and all, but I'll hold on the enthusiasm until we're able to take a *real* picture of an extra-solar planet.

Re:High degree of confidence

[LurkerXXX]

How many pixels does it take to make it a *real* picture?

Re:High degree of confidence

[Anonymous Coward]

Large enough so that you can stare at it, and be wowed while stoned. (ie neat patterns, etc)

Re:High degree of confidence

[M1FCJ]

If you believe Canon and Nikon et al., at least 5MPixels... If only Canon's toy cameras had as good CCDs as their EOS lines.

Planet Finder

[KavanaghNY]

NASA is developing the Terrestrial Planet Finder which should discover and image even smaller extrasolar planets when it is launched in a few years. Sooner than that, the Kepler Mission "will survey the extended solar neighborhood to detect and characterize hundreds of terrestrial and larger planets in or near the "habitable zone," defined by scientists as the distance from a star where liquid water can exist on a planet's surface."

Re:Planet Finder

[Anonymous Coward]

And add to that Darwin.

Re:Planet Finder

[Decaff]

in or near the "habitable zone," defined by scientists as the distance from a star where liquid water can exist on a planet's surface."

The habitable zone is a rather out-of-date idea. Just look at our solar system: There is probably more liquid water all over the place - possibly in Jupiter's atmosphere as a result of internal heat, almost certainly under an ice layer on Europa and perhaps in a similar state on Callisto. Mercury has such a range of temperatures that liquid water is at least possible (although unlikely) somewhere on the planet.

Even extrasolar planets could have liquid water as a result of internal heat from radioactive decay if their atmospheres are thick enough to keep the heat in.

Re:Planet Finder

[bitingduck]

The habitable zone is a rather out-of-date idea.

Sort of. A star has a zone where liquid water could be available in large enough quantities to make a large fraction of the planet habitable for long periods, which is what's necessary for a remote detection (at least with forseeable technology).

Mercury is unlikely to have enough water for long enough to support life, and doesn't have any atmosphere to speak of, so it wouldn't be possible to detect life around an exo-mercury, even if you could observe that close to a star.

Moons of gas giants are trickier business-- the gas giants have their own habitable zones that are more or less separate from those of the parent star. Because they can actually hold an atmosphere it's conceivable to detect those, but it's hard enough just to detect the ones around the stars where they orbit farther from the parent and reflect or emit enough photons to gather in a reasonable time.

It's still useful to talk about the habitable zone of a star when looking for extra-solar planets. But other things in the stellar system (tidal locking around a gas giant, or a hot radioactive core) could create additional habitable areas.

Re:Planet Finder

[Decaff]

Sort of. A star has a zone where liquid water could be available in large enough quantities to make a large fraction of the planet habitable for long periods, which is what's necessary for a remote detection (at least with forseeable technology)

Yes, but... the liquid water on Earth is mainly a result of CO2 in the atmosphere. Without that it would be ice! It's controversial as to whether or not Earth is actually in a so-called 'habitable zone' if that is based simply on distance from the Sun.

It's still useful to talk about the habitable zone of a star when looking for extra-solar planets. But other things in the stellar system (tidal locking around a gas giant, or a hot radioactive core) could create additional habitable areas.

Well, if you look at tidally locked moons, it could well be that the main potentially habitable water is around Jupiter, and it's the Earth that is 'additional' (especially if you average things over the lifetime of the Sun).

I see what you are saying in terms of looking for planets, but in terms of looking for life and the majority of liquid water, the whole idea of 'habitable zone' looks very misleading.

Re:Planet Finder

[M1FCJ]

Habitable zone is quite similar to the androcentric cosmic view which can be summarized as we exist because the situations are right. Therefore only where the situation is similar to where we exist, other intelligent beings can be. In my opinion it's a pile of brown smelly stuff.

If we didn't have an atmosphere or the wrong type of it as you mentioned, Earth would be uninhabitable.

Unfortunately as like creationists, androcentrics never give up either.

Re:Planet Finder

[M1FCJ]

argh, I didn't mean androcentric... damn, what's the word... I've lost my cognitive abilities! Anthropocentrism? Probably that's what I've meant!

Re:Planet Finder

[Decaff]

Habitable zone is quite similar to the androcentric cosmic view which can be summarized as we exist because the situations are right. Therefore only where the situation is similar to where we exist, other intelligent beings can be. In my opinion it's a pile of brown smelly stuff.

Heh. I agree. I support Jack Cohen's view that most scientists looking for life in space are really only looking for where they would find something almost exactly like themselves, not looking for where life REALLY might be.

Re:Planet Finder

[bitingduck]

I think there are plenty of people who are willing (and interested in) looking more broadly for life, but it isn't easy, it's very expensive, and you have to start somewhere.

Right now we have one example of a planet where life formed, so we look for things like that. As we get better at it, I have little doubt that the search will broaden, but people are going for what look like the easy pickings first-- things that we more or less know how to detect and could probably get lots of people to agree are signs of life.

Re:Planet Finder

[Decaff]

but people are going for what look like the easy pickings first

A reasonable point, but I don't think they are going for easy pickings. Small, Earth-like planets are very hard to find. Possible signature of life is physical or chemical situations that are not at thermodynamic equilibrium (a good example is the recent discovery of methane on Mars). I feel we should be looking for much broader (and easier to find) signatures of life than small Earth-like planets in a mythical 'habitable zone'.

Yeah...so what?

[Easy2RememberNick]

Sure it's interesting, but useless. I'd rather hear about a planet that is actually able to support human-type life or even humnas. Not a gigantic ball of gas orbiting a compressed sun that would suck your fillings out of your head from 10 light years away.

Re:Yeah...so what?

[Dan East]

The planet candidate is about 1.5 times the diameter of Jupiter and about five times as massive.

Who said it was a ball of gas? The earth is four times denser than Jupiter, so this planet would be similar to the earth in density.

Dan East

Re:Yeah...so what?

[VanillaCoke420]

Well we can't do all the cool things we want to do right away. We have to take it in steps. One day we will be able to produce rough maps of Earth sized exoplanets - but not today. What the article describes is one step closer to that goal.

Re:Yeah...so what?

[Dan East]

Here are some calculations.

The planet candidate has 1.5 times the diameter of Jupiter, which means its volume is 2.25 greater. However it is 5 times as massive as Jupiter, so its density would have to be 2.222 times greater.

Earth is 4.16 times denser than Jupiter, so Earth is only 1.873 times denser than this new planet.

I think that's right. :)

Dan East

Re:Yeah...so what?

[Dan East]

Okay, that's wrong.

The planet candidate has 3.375 times the volume of Jupiter (calculated the volume wrong). It is 5 times as massive, so its density is 1.48 times greater. Thus Earth is 2.8 times denser than this planet.

Dan East

Re:Yeah...so what?

[crumley]

The planet candidate is about 1.5 times the diameter of Jupiter and about five times as massive. Who said it was a ball of gas? The earth is four times denser than Jupiter, so this planet would be similar to the earth in density.

Not quite.

Mass is proportional to volume, and this planet would have 3.4 times the volume of Jupiter. So its density would only be 1.5 times that of Jupiter. That higher density could easily be explained by having the same composition as Jupiter, just more tightly packed due to this planet's higher gravity. The differences between this planet and Jupiter are probably similar to the differences between Jupiter and Saturn.

Re:Yeah...so what?

[SnapShot]

The formula for volume is 4/3 * pi * r^3.

If the radius is 1.5 the radius of Jupiter then the volume is over three and a third times Jupiter's (1:3.375). The density is therefore only slightly greater than Jupiter's (and probably due to the relatively higher gravity). My opinion (which is worth what you paid for it) is that this is a star that didn't quite make it.

Re:Yeah...so what?

[centauri]

Face it. We're just as likely to colonize this gas giant as we would be to colonize an earth-like planet.

Re:Yeah...so what?

[M1FCJ]

the equation only true when you have a uniform density. Gas giants don't have uniform density and they are very dense at the core.

Houston we have a problem.

[Fizzlewhiff]

It looks like the picture of the planet has been replaced by a screen shot of the classic Wizard of Wor arcade game radar screen.

Re:Houston we have a problem.

[wkitchen]

Heh, I had one of those machines in my living room about 1987. I bought it for $165 from an arcade that was selling off some of their old machines to make room for new ones. I can still remember the sounds it made in amazing detail.

Looks like a duck...

[slapout]

It does not orbit a normal star, and it is much more massive than the largest planets in our solar system.

So, we've found an object in space that's unlike any other planet we've seen, so we assume it's a planet?

Re:Looks like a duck...

[DeathByDuke]

Its the third Death Star. Too Bad for them we've spotted it.

Re:Looks like a duck...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, because a planet is typically defined to be any body within a certain mass range, orbiting a star.

What do you think it is, if not a planet?

Re:Looks like a duck...

[HeghmoH]

This happened with Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto; would you say none of them are planets?

Re:Looks like a duck...

[LMCBoy]

So, we've found an object in space that's unlike any other planet we've seen, so we assume it's a planet?

(1) Actually, most of the extrasolar planets we've discovered so far are much more massive than Jupiter. So, of the known planets, Earth-like planets are rather the exception, not the rule. (Of course, this is pretty meaningless, since we can't yet detect earth-sized bodies outside the solar system; still, to say that this object is "unlike any other planet we've seen" is far off the mark).

(2) It has far too little mass to be a brown dwarf, and it is far too big to be an asteroid. It is therefore a "planet", by definition (unless it's an Imperial battle station).

Re:Looks like a duck...

[slapout]

Or too bad for us...maybe we can send Bruce Willis up to take care of it :-)

Re:Looks like a duck...

[slapout]

As many readers know, planets outside our solar system are typically found by watching for wobbles in a star's orbit or for dimming caused by the planet crossing in front of its star.


Besides being a joke, my post was also a jab at how we find new planets. I don't think because a star's light dims, we can assume we've found a new planet.

Re:Looks like a duck...

[LMCBoy]

I don't think because a star's light dims, we can assume we've found a new planet.

Well, think again :)

The argument is not "the star's light dimmed, so there must be a planet!". The "lightcurve" (brightness as a function of time) must have particular properties that make the hypothesis of an eclipse event by a small body the most likely explanation: the lightcurve is flat except for a small interval during which it dips by a few percent, remains at that level for a short time, and then rises back up to its original level. This flat-dip feature is periodic, and achromatic (it doesn't affect the star's color).

There is no internal physical process in stars that can produce such a lightcurve. Some stars can vary in brightness by pulsating, but the lightcurve in this case is sinusoidal, and it oscillates in color as well as brightness (because the surface temperature changes as the star "breathes").

We understand stars well enough that we know which ones oscillate, and which ones should have a rock-steady lightcurve. When you see a square-shaped, periodic, achromatic dip in the lightcurve of a star that has no business varying its luminosity, the most (only?!) reasonable hypothesis is that "something" is orbiting the star and eclipsing it. The fraction of light blocked during ingress gives you a limit on the size of the eclipsing body (relative to the known size of the star), which will tell you if the eclipsing body is a planet (small) or brown dwarf (big).

Re:Looks like a duck...

[Anonymous Coward]

no, but I would say only Uranus and Neptune are planets :)

Re:Looks like a duck...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll bow to the actual astronomers, but there is some fuzzy ground on what a brown dwarf is. Stars burn hydrogen in their cores, BDs burn deuterium. Both have fully convective envelopes, but the core of a brown dwarf isn't hot enough to also burn the lithium (which has a combustion threshold close to the hydrogen) so BDs will have lithium lines in there spectrum close to the primordial amount. Caveat: Brown dwarfs above 60 Jupiters should have a high enough temperature to combust their lithium.

On the other end, with small BDs, it gets really fuzzy. The main functional criterion between a brown dwarf and a planet is whether it has ever sustained a nuclear fusion reaction. A BD continues to be called such even after it has exhausted its deuterium. It undergoes no other metamorphoses except to radiate until it's a cool cinder, so you can't say that because you don't observe fusion it's not a BD. (Red Dwarfs also cinderize, theoretically, since they can't burn Helium, but the lowest mass ones are thought to have Main Sequence lives in the Trillions of years, sooooo) So you go by the model, which says that below 13 Jupiter masses deuterium fusion should not be able to occur. Of course rapid rotation could futz with that number.

However, this object is so far below that line, it's a planet.

Bump on planet?

[geordieboy]

In this image it looks like the planet has a bump on the lower left side. Could this be a mega-Olympus Mons (on a gas giant, hmm)? Yeah, yeah, I'm sure it's just noise, but it's fun to over-analyze images.

Re:Bump on planet?

[CaptRespect]

" but it's fun to over-analyze images."

No it isn't.

Re:Bump on planet?

[groyse]

People say I'm overly analytical. I wonder why that is?

Re:Bump on planet?

[p3d0]

Here is a link with a better caption.

Re:Bump on planet?

[Anonymous Coward]

Strange, encoding the caption in the URL like that...

Re:Bump on planet?

[Tablizer]

In this image it looks like the planet has a bump on the lower left side. Could this be a mega-Olympus Mons (on a gas giant, hmm)? Yeah, yeah, I'm sure it's just noise, but it's fun to over-analyze images.

It would be a hoot if somebody got a closeup of something that formerly only had grainy images of it available, and it turned out the grains and pixelation were real. The planet would be inhabited by the Lego Dalmation race.

Re:Bump on planet?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe it's a penis.

Re:orbit - MSNBC appears to have misquoted

[tinytim]

The MSNBC cites the space.com article as its source, and the space.com article states:
"It orbits the brown dwarf star at about 30 percent farther than Pluto is from our Sun."

Actually I am wondering... (use tinfoil hat!)

[cronostitan]

they are able to find a _planet_ that is away more than 225 light years but they aren't able to point their telescopes toward the moon to find out if the vehicles from the moon landing are really there...

Can someone explain that to me?

Is it because they are only finding out by radiation instead of visual photography?? the moon has no atmosphere.. i just vant imagine tehre is no telescope orbiting our earth which isn't capable to take pictures from the moon in very high resolution?

Re:Actually I am wondering... (use tinfoil hat!)

[Anonymous Coward]

the moon is too close for hubble to focus on.. its made to view stuff at a distance, outside our galaxy

Re:Actually I am wondering... (use tinfoil hat!)

[Anonymous Coward]

The short answer is that hubbles diffaction limited resolution is to low to resolve the lunar landers by a couple of orders of magnitude.

http://www.100megsfree4.com/farshores/noluncon.htm

ps. Google is your friend. If you had bothered to search for 'hubble lunar' it is the third link.

Re:Actually I am wondering... (use tinfoil hat!)

[timster]

I think it's sort of like how you can see a stoplight from a mile away but you can't see a bacterium on your fingernail -- the moon vehicles are really really small for astronomical objects. Also, I should point out that they found this by observing a wobble in a star. Stars are glowing, whereas the lunar vehicles are not -- they reflect about the same amount of sunlight as regular moon rocks do.

It seems like I read somewhere that the next generation of telescopes may have enough resolution to see the lunar landing sites.

Re:Actually I am wondering... (use tinfoil hat!)

[l4m3z0r]

I imagine that none of our sufficiently large telescopes are built to be able to focus on something as close as the moon telescopes typically can focus properly on a range that is determined by components of the optical system, my guess is that if hubble took a look at the moon we would get a horrible grainy image, no clarity whatsoever.

For example, take a normal commercial telescope and put an object 1 inch from the lens and see if you can get it to focus properly.

Furthermore, why waste the effort doing something so trivial. We have images of the moon with that crap lying about but the nutjobs don't accept those, what makes you think telescope images from earth would change there minds? The conspiracy nuts are just going to claim the telescope photos are doctored.

Re:Actually I am wondering... (use tinfoil hat!)

[east coast]

they are able to find a _planet_ that is away more than 225 light years but they aren't able to point their telescopes toward the moon to find out if the vehicles from the moon landing are really there...

Attention all Tin Foil Hat wearers! Much to the dismay of management we've now accepted that no proof given to you short of personal experience will be considered as acceptable by you. If big brother controls the best equipment on and off the Earth wouldn't it be more likely that they could just fake a photo of the Lunar craft(s)? Because we all know that photos are such acceptable proof to the skeptics, most don't bother to waste their time.

And this isn't even factoring the technical aspects of photographing procedure itself.

Re:Actually I am wondering... (use tinfoil hat!)

[dtolman]

they are able to find a _planet_ that is away more than 225 light years but they aren't able to point their telescopes toward the moon to find out if the vehicles from the moon landing are really there...

They can find the planet because its a big ball of matter glowing in the ir/light/uv spectrum against a backdrop of cold dark space.

The lander is a tiny piece of cold painted metal against a backdrop of lunar rock. That makes it a bit harder to see... next time we need to paint those suckers with radioactive glow-in-the-dark paint so that every schmuck on Earth can see it with binoculars. That'll shut the nay-sayers up.

Re:Actually I am wondering... (use tinfoil hat!)

[Enigma_Man]

We don't have the resolution to see the landers themselves, but we can see their Shadows if we try hard enough.

-Jesse

Re:Actually I am wondering... (use tinfoil hat!)

[Anonymous Coward]

"i just vant imagine tehre is no telescope orbiting our earth which isn't capable to take pictures from the moon in very high resolution?"

According to a Weekly World News article I read a few years ago, not only is there such a telescope, but a Swiss astronomer used it to snap a picture of a World War II bomber found in a crater there.

I saw it with my own eyes, right on the front page.

-Anonymous Phil

Re:Actually I am wondering... (use tinfoil hat!)

[M1FCJ]

We're bouncing bloody lasers off the stuff they left there. What kind of proof people really need to believe we've landed?

Re:Actually I am wondering... (use tinfoil hat!)

[M1FCJ]

Damn, they found my secret base! It won't be there the next time you look for it! :)

5 times the size of Jupiter?

[mAineAc]

At 5 times the size of jupiter and out as far as pluto around a brown giant. This sounds more like a dead star orbiting an almost dead star. Could this have once been a binary star system at one time?

Re:5 times the size of Jupiter?

[Bambi Dee]

No, it's about 1.5 times the size of Jupiter, and about 5 times as massive as Jupiter. And it's a brown dwarf, not a "brown giant". So isn't it more like a binary non-star system?

at those ratios...

[dAzED1]

a brown dwarf, versus something 5 tiems the size of jupiter? Further appart than our sun and Pluto?

Anyone know where estimates for the actual sizes of these bodies are? Almost sounds like its not entirely fair to call it a star/planet relationship, but instead a small star and tiny dead star...maybe?

Re:at those ratios...

[Rhinobird]

from the article, the planet is about 1.5 times the size of Jupiter with 5 times the mass. The "star" is a brown dwarf, with 25 times the mass of Jupiter, but it's not fusing, but it is outputting copious amounts of infrared energy.

Now we just need to figure out how to classify brown dwarfs. Are they stars? Are they planets? Are they something in between?

Must be Planet X

[Emperor Shaddam IV]

Hmmm... Must be Planet X. I wonder if Lord British is hanging out there? Then there was Saturn. I think thats where all the Jester's were. Anyone have any Trilithium, a Skull Key and the coordinates for Planet X? :)

Even stars are just pixalated blobs

[amstrad]

As far as stars go, only Betelgeuse is large enough and close enough to get (slightly) more than a pixelated pinpoint. And stars tend to be bigger than planets.

Re:orbit - MSNBC appears to have misquoted

[stupidfoo]

No, MSNBC Is NEVER wrong!

I just took a photo of it with my 17" CRT

[Anonymous Coward]

Look here -> .

Estimated 7 times the size of Jupiter and 4 light years away. Burt Ruton is now selling tickets for a one way trip. :-)

to put this in scale

[jbeamon]

This new planet is 1.5x the size of Jupiter and 5x Jupiter's mass. Its orbit is 30% farther out from its star than Pluto is from our sun. To put things in perspective, Jupiter has been described as a brown dwarf star, since it is mostly gaseous and gives off more radiation than can be accounted for by solar reflection. This new planet-star relationship is closer to a binary star system than to our 365 day whirl around the block at a balmy 65 degrees F. (I make a point about the design and structure of their system in comparison to ours, so I won't argue with astronomy buffs about the particulars.) It's still interesting, but it's not like there's much possibility of a Starbucks there yet.

Focus Distance

[WillerZ]

The 28mm lens on my camera can focus on objects as close as 0.29 metres. Long (800mm and up) lenses typically have trouble focusing on things which are closer than 1 metre.

Now look at hubble. It's essentially got a huuuuuuge telephoto lens with the focus fixed at infinity. You could point it at the moon, but the best you'd get is a blurry grey blob covering the entire imaging area.

Phil

Re:Focus Distance

[timster]

I don't think it has anything to do with focus. Even with a huge telescope, anything more than a thousand miles away should be well within infinite focus, since it's an asymptotic sort of thing. Someone should correct me if I'm wrong though.

A sibling post has a good link which explains that Hubble simply doesn't have the resolution, and it's also inconvenient that the moon moves so quickly.

Let's see...

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe they don't do it because it's a bloody waste of time?

Even if the internals of the hubble could be remotely calibrated to focus on the surface of the moon, I'm sure such an endeavour would not be reasonable. You can live in your fantasy that the moon landing was fake, let us know when you want to join reality.

Re:Let's see...

[cronostitan]

I didn't say that I don't believe in the moon landing... IMHO they were walking on the moon. But I bet it would stop people bad-mouthing the moon landings.

Re:Let's see...

[DrinkingIllini]

No it wouldn't because the data is coming out of NASA, all hubble images could easily be faked, much easier than the moon landing. Conspiracy theorists can never be proven wrong as any evidence to their contrary could be part of the conspiracy.

Re:Let's see...

[Bambi Dee]

Yeah, well, but what if they landed on the moon and left "evidence" just to shut up the conspiracy theorists? Sneaky, crafty bastards... probably filmed it all on their stage on Mars anyway.

not orbiting sun

[Keruo]

maybe someone decided to build dyson sphere instead

Re:not orbiting sun

[Tongo]

You've just been itching to use "dyson sphere" in a post on here haven't you?

That far way?

[mshiltonj]

If we can a plant 225 light years away, does that mean we have definitively ruled out the existence of planets in the solar systems close to us? If so, are planets rare? /me notes to look this stuff up later this evening.

Re:That far way?

[east coast]

does that mean we have definitively ruled out the existence of planets in the solar systems close to us?

Hell, we haven't even ruled out the existence of more planets in OUR solar system. Give it some time.

Re:That far way?

[ByrneArena]

It was easier to see BECAUSE it goes around a brown dwarf. A brown dwarf has the mass to be a sun but not enough "feul" to create the fission reaction to light up. So essentially it is easier to see because there is not as much light around it. That and the fact that it is such a large planet. While 5 time Jupiter's size seems large, there are suns that are as big as the entire ORBIT of Jupiter in diameter. So as planets go, yes its big, but not sun-like in size.

Re:That far way?

[StyroCupMan]

With our current technology, the largest extra-solar planets are the only ones we can reliably detect, let alone photograph.

It helped significantly in this case that the planet was so far away from a dim star, because most of the difficulty comes when searching for a dim speck in the glare of a bright star. The December National Geographic had a great article on the search for extra-solar planets and compared it to finding a firefly in the glare of a lighthouse from several miles away.

Thus, astronomers have not ruled out the possibility of planets in nearby systems. In fact there are already a few hundred that have been found, but only by detecting the "wobble" of the sun as others here have pointed out. This is the first to be directly imaged.

As technology and methods continue to improve we will be able to detect smaller and smaller planets, closer and closer to their suns. The smallest currently detected is around 14 times the size of Earth (roughly the size of Neptune, I believe).

Once we can regularly detect Earth-sized planets in life-sustaining orbits, astronomers hope to be able to detect hints of the planets' compositions using the spectrums of light emitted (can't remember the exact terminology off-hand).

Anyway, for those of us familiar with astronomy and astrobiology, this is very exciting. And to put it into perspective, this image is of even better resolution than we had of Pluto until just a few years ago.

Yes, IAAAA (I am an amateur astronomer).

Good explanation of original observation

[mykdavies]

and a great picture: http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/planet_photo _040910.html.

Mirror image

[Anonymous Coward]

Since the server is down, here is a mirror image:

.

Best wishes,

Tels

Re:Mirror image

[Anonymous Coward]

You failed to mention that this is a false color image. I hate when they do that - LIKE I DON'T KNOW

Re:Mirror image

[Anonymous Coward]

It look like this from Keck.

*

Wait until April to get excited...

[dtolman]

...when they can confirm closer to 100%. This isn't the first time they've seen a dim point of light next to a star and hoped its a planet. Last time they waited a few months, they found out that the "planet" stayed put while the star moved on its merry way.

If the "planet" is still moving in concert with the star in a few months, then I'll believe it.

Re:Wait until April to get excited...

[CK2004PA]

If you read the article they are 99.1% sure its a planet. In a few months they will be 99% sure or not sure at all after this planet, with its very large orbit, has time to move (so they can monitor and pinpoint its orbit).

So you'll be happy in a few months or just miserable like you are now.

Re:Wait until April to get excited...

[Tablizer]

Last time they waited a few months, they found out that the "planet" stayed put while the star moved on its merry way.

Damned aliens playing with laser pens again? Sic the Dept. of Homeplanet Security on them. Somebody peering through a telescope might lose an eye one of these days

Re:Wait until April to get excited...

[dtolman]

or just miserable like you are now.

Baby - if the mood I'm in now is misery, I hope they never find out :)

Re:I HATE ALL OF YOU!

[Anonymous Coward]

And I always thought extrasolar civilizations would be friendly :-\

binary vision

[Doc Ruby]

One interesting result of the mechanics of this exploration is the discovery of such nearly-binary star systems, described as "planetary". A huge gas giant orbiting a dark (brown), small (dwarf) star is more binary, with a common center of gravity - and orbit - somewhere between the geometric centers of both bodies. (The Earth and Moon are a binary planet, orbiting a center inside the Earth, offeset from our exact center.) All kinds of fascinating astrophysics - like perhaps a gravitational/orbital pump that pushes one, denser gas giant over the edge into fusion as a brown dwarf - might be discovered. And perhaps even harnessed by Earth physicists for more mundane tasks like lighting streets at night. Another interesting effect might be to demonstrate that the "planet"/"star" distinction is more of a continuum, which might help the public better understand the Earth's place in the menagerie. When we finally discover an Earthlike planet in another solar system, we'll need all the wisdom we can get to deal with the next "age of colonization".

Definition of a Planet

[ShawnCassidy]

At the bottom of the article is a link to a debate over the definition of a planet.

My thought is that they should restrict the term Planet to just our original nine planets (Mercury through Pluto).

My argument is that people are afraid of change or having to forget what they have learned and relearn it. So if you accept that statement, then you should hopefully agree that any definition of planet should include the nine planets of our solar system so people don't have to forget about any one of them being a planet. In addition, it would be a shock for people to suddenly go from 9 to 12 to over two dozen planets in our solar system, so it would probably be a good idea to restrict it to include only a couple more planets being added to our solar system (maybe 12 at most). This obviously makes the definition difficult.

My proposal is to keep the term 'Planet' restricted to just our 9 original planets as I stated before. Just Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto, no others. Then just continue to define spacial objects as they already are, according to their physical properties, (weight, size, composition, movement, what they move about, etc). If the nine planets are given another term in addition to Planet, oh well. I think people would accept that more than any other definition of planet. Also, since the IAU has no formal definition of planet, the scientific community would hopefully not be rocked by this.

Re:Definition of a Planet

[Kehvarl]

Why should the 9 Sol-System planets be the only ones defined as planets?

Also, if we did define the 9 local planets as the only planets, what would we call other planet-sized bodies of similar/identical composition that we find orbiting other stars? In addition to this, what would the legions of star trek fans do if they had to stop calling non-Sol worlds someting other than planets?

Re:Definition of a Planet

[Anonymous Coward]

God forbid we expect people to count higher than the number of fingers they have.

Re:Definition of a Planet

[Anonymous Coward]

my proposal is we only have 8 planets, pluto is too small, and has a totally irregular orbit compared to the others.

Re:Definition of a Planet

[Anonymous Coward]

What the fuck are you talking about?

That's no...

[Anonymous Coward]

...moon..err planet-- it's a space station!

OK, so would someone please...

[Anonymous Coward]

...explain what constitutes a planet?

Girls

[phorm]

Hmmm... well it would be easy to get most geeks on the shuttle. Tell them that they're to help start a new human colony on a distant planet, 1-2 females per each male.

The only problem then will be to keep the females from cancelling their shuttle bookings...

Re:Girls

[AviLazar]

Tell them they will get a lifetime supply of coach/vendi purses and versaci shoes

For useful information, check the abstract...

[Anonymous Coward]

Abstract

[11.14] NICMOS Imaging of 2MASSWJ 1207334-393254 - A Planetary-Mass Companion Candidate

G. Schneider (Steward Obs., UofA), I. Song (Gemini Obs.), B. Zuckerman, E. Becklin (UCLA), P. Lowrance (Caltech), B. Macintosh (LLNL), M. Bessell (ANU), C. Dumas, G. Chauvin (ESO)

2MASSWJ 1207334-393254, a likely member of the nearby TW Hya association (age app 10 Myr and app 70 pc from Earth), is an app 30 Mjupiter brown dwarf (M8V spectrum due to its youth) for which a putative candidate planetary-mass companion was identified by Chauvin et al (Astron. and Astroph. 425, L29) with VLT/NACO observations in April 2004. Earlier, 2MASSWJ 1207334-393254 had been scheduled for observation in HST cycle 13 in a NICMOS H-band coronagraphic companion detection survey (GO 10176), but was re-programmed as an early "follow-up" observation given the ground-based derived implications for shorter wavelength space-based detection and efficacious diagnostic photometric measurements. Here, we present NICMOS camera 1 imaging photometry observations of 2MASSWJ 1207334-393254 and its point-like companion candidate in three bands: F090M (0.80 - 1.00 microns; similar to I-band), F110M (1.00 - 1.20 microns) and F160W (1.40 - 1.60 microns; similar to H-band) obtained on 28 Aug 2004. For the 773.7 +/- 2.2 mas (app 55 AU projected separation) distant companion we find in-band magnitudes for the companion candidate of F090M = 22.34 +/- 0.35 (delta-F090M = +7.14), F110M = 20.61 +/- 0.15 and (delta-F110M = +7.02) F160W = 18.24 +/- 0.02 (delta-F160W = +5.62). The NICMOS [0.90] - [1.6] micron color index of +4.1 +/- 0.4 is consistent with expectations for the spectral energy distribution of a mid to late L-dwarf (e.g., I - H of app +4.4 for spectral type L4). At the likely age of this candidate, the NICMOS and longer wavelength VLT/NACO derived photometric measures may implicate an object of several Jupiter masses. If the candidate companion is (as is yet to be) demonstrated to exhibit common proper motion with 2MASSWJ 1207334-393254 then the first image of a gravitationally bound companion of planetary mass may have already been secured. This work is supported through grants to the GO 10176 and 10177 teams from STScI, which is operated by AURA, Inc., under NASA contract NAS 5-26555.

Re:5 times as massive? isn't it supposed to implod

[eggoeater]

I had always heard that Jupiter would have to be 6x as massive for a fusion reaction to trigger. Event then it would be a very cold star. Our Sun is actually larger than average... essentially our system could have been an "average" binary system, but for whatever reason our Sun grabbed most of the material (99%) and Jupiter most of the rest (something like 0.75%) with the rest of the plants taking the rest (0.25%).

Take the second flight...

[Dareth]

Reminds me of a short story I read years ago...
Colonists gave up everything they own for a chance to colonize a new planet, but they get to be first.

Only thing is, right after they leave Earth, FTL travel is invented. So by the time they get there, planet is already fully colonized and they end up getting a raw deal.

Re:Take the second flight...

[AviLazar]

that royally sucks...you would think they would pick them up along the way.

Re:Take the second flight...

[Blakey Rat]

I've read books like that, too, but the faster-than-light ship always stops to pick up the people in the slowboats. Don't be stupid; it's not like nobody on Earth knew they were on their way to that planet, of course they'd stop to pick them up before going on themselves. People are jerks.

Re:Take the second flight...

[dbacher]

That of course depends on the particular flavor of FTL used.

If it's the Warp Drive, Electron Stutter, hyper, etc. where the assumption is that the speed of light is no different from the speed of sound, then you might be able to pick up the people in the slow boat (if there was enough space, etc.), and at least probably could send someone back for them.

If it's a Jump drive, gate drive, wormhole, etc. that you use, then there's not really a way to pick them up. It all depends on how faster than light travel eventually works itself out.

Re:Take the second flight...

[lcsjk]

Welcome to our planet! You will be put in with the FTL group until we can determine that your kind are safe to let out in our environment. If you had a passport, things would progress much faster. Maybe in 20-30 years, ....., meanwhile...

Re:Take the second flight...

[chenwah]

Yeah, I read something similar. The surge of emigration from earth in chemical rockets travelled out from the planet in an expanding sphere. Some time after the first wave was launched FTL travel was discovered and the universe pretty much colonised instantaneously. For centuries the more developed FTL colonists had to deal with this expanding wave of rocketeers. Over generations on the rockets the first colonists had maintained their old ass-backwards earth customs and the FTL bunch saw them as a bunch of stone age gypsies.

The name they gave them really stuck with me: 'anachronauts' :-) .flip.

Quote from Carl Sagan...

[Observador]

seems strangely appropiate, especially when looking at the original OSE picture:

"Since, in the long run, every planetary society will be endangered by impacts from space, every surviving civilization is obliged to become spacefaring--not because of exploratory or romantic zeal, but for the most practical reason imaginable: staying alive." ~ Pale Blue Dot by Carl Sagan

Here's why you don't wanna go

[BlueStraggler]

Interstellar travel suffers from its own version of Moore's Law. The first ships will be damn slow, but they will increase in speed fairly steadily as we become more comfortable with the technology. The problem is, the new ships will blow past the old ships en route, and the first ones to leave will be the last ones to arrive. An interstellar travel time of ~100 years would be making pretty good time for an early mission to somewhere in the local neighbourhood. If you could get a five-fold speed increase in say 25 years of development back here on Earth (a very modest rate of development, IMO), then you could expect the planet would be explored at least 50 years before you got there, which gives enough time for settlement, expansion, and several waves of colonists in even faster ships.

In other words, by the time the first explorers (that's you) arrive, there will already be 150 Starbucks franchises on the planet, the planet will be launching its own missions to further stars, and you will be turned back at the spaceport for not having the right Visas in your passport.

In fact, no matter how long you wait for a faster interstellar drive, a mission launched a short time after yours will arrive a short time sooner than yours. This will remain true until some physical limitation starts capping speeds, or until the travel time becomes small compared to the time between incremental improvements in drive speed.

The same is true for unmanned probes, unfortunately.

Re:Here's why you don't wanna go

[AviLazar]

So what do we do? Stop the effort to travel? Travel shorter distances (lets colonize the moon). Pick up the ships along the way? "Hey on your way to planet XYZ would you stop by and pick up space shuttle 1 - they've been on the road for 20 years you know. Oh and I hear one of the passangers, Avi, likes La Columbe Coffee and is going crazy because he is forced to drink harbucks" Put the ship and tow and continue onward with Half-Life 15: Counter Strike - Beyond the Source

Re:Here's why you don't wanna go

[Boglin]

Then some joker invents the FTL drive and there's a colony on the planet before the first ships were even built.

Newbie Question

[bruthasj]

Large planet orbiting brown dwarf. How is it lit up enough to see it?

Re:Newbie Question

[M1FCJ]

You don't have to see it with the reflected light. If it is hot enough you can see it by the light itself generates. Almost all of this will be in the infrared region. As long as you have a receiver which is cooler than the transmitter (planet), you can (theoretically) see it.

can't talk about sigmas

[pyrrho]

which is sadly why people don't learn about the term.

playing to peoples ignorance while educating them... ah, I know it's a balancing trick...

Stupid question

[alta]

Ok, this is probably very stupid, but I don't have the answer myself.

My understanding: Our sun is a big ball of hydrogen that because of it's immense gravity is compressed into helium (the fusion part) which gives off immense amounts of engery.

The stupid me part: I know there's "fire" out there, so what keeps it from going up all at once like the hindenburg? Not enough oxygen to light? Looking here:http://www.krysstal.com/solarsys_sun.html it shows the sun is 92% H and .061 O. That supports my guess, but it's just that. Thanks

Re:Stupid question

[Boronx]

The sun is already way hotter than burning hydrogen, and any water that did form would immediately be blown apart again, I'd guess.

Re:Stupid question

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, bingo. For Hydrogen to burn you need 8 parts (by mass) Oxygen per part Hydrogen. The thing can't "burn".

In Terms Slashdot Geeks Understand

[Anonymous Coward]

The planet is about 5 times as massive as Jupiter and orbits a brown dwarf a little farther out than Pluto orbits our own sun."

That's a great start but awww- that's not an M class planet.

reason we did not notice it until now

[eferrari]

Omnicron
run RUN r u u u u n!!!

Re:I HATE ALL OF YOU!

[Anonymous Coward]

I, for one, welcome our new, permanent, orange afro-ed overlords.

Interstellar Space Probe

[Schwarzchild]

I would love to see someone (NASA, ESA, etc.) send a space probe to another solar system. Perhaps one of those Daedalus type contraptions with a fusion drive or something more modern with an ion drive? Anyway, it would be nice if someone sent a device that could get to another system in say 20 years.

Of course, if we find Apes there that could be a problem...

Photo from lunar orbit of the lunar module

[Anonymous Coward]

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap020628.html

Proposed Solution

[rk]

In other words, by the time the first explorers (that's you) arrive, there will already be 150 Starbucks franchises on the planet, the planet will be launching its own missions to further stars, and you will be turned back at the spaceport for not having the right Visas in your passport.

So, what you do before setting out in your first generation colony ship is to form an organization back an Earth whose mission it is to manage a trust/foundation and apply newer technology as it becomes available to support your colonization mission. So that when you get there, there may be 150 Starbuck's franchises, but you own them all.

That itself could be another interesting SF story about the changes a colony goes through when the owners/founders finally arrive after it's been operating for several generations.

Re:Proposed Solution

[Dabido]

"So that when you get there, there may be 150 Starbuck's franchises, but you own them all."

Welcome to Planet Starbucks Slowboat Colony people.
We have some very good news for you, you are all multi-billionaires.

We also have some bad news. Due to inflation, your multi-billions of dollars are enough to buy yourself one Starbucks coffee.

And for those of you who invested in MacDonalds before you left, unfortunately, it went under after it started pretending to be healthy. After all, what's the point of going ot MacDonalds to buy a Salad. It defeats the purpose of fast junk food. So you are all broke, and now get to work in the only feasible franchise operating on the planet. Starbucks.

The CEO of the planet welcomes both our new slaves .. um, I mean Employees, as well as our new board members. We hope you enjoyed the flight here. For those of you who wish to return to Earth to complain, a FTL ship will be leaving in four minutes. If you miss that one, we have one leaving every half hour.

Thank you for your time. Enjoy the rest of your lives.

Robots.

[emjoi_gently]

I have this feeling that the idea of People travelling to other planets, near or far, is out of date. It cost too much, and does too little practically.

As telemetry improves, and the intelligence and sensors in Robotic Rovers gets better, then there just isn't any point, apart from being a Cool Thing To Do.

(How's that for flamebait?)

Re:5 times as massive? isn't it supposed to implod

[neonmagic]

Around 10 times the mass would be required to fission to start. It's a hard figure to exactly quote.

Our sun is NOT larger than average, in fact it's a smaller than average G2 runty shitty lil star. There was never really enough mass in the system i'd say for a binary system.

Still, Sol is home!

Dave

Is that the Sam Neill who was in Event Horizon?

[bitingduck]

It was 'Space with Sam Neil', a BBC documentary in 6 episodes.. quite nice, actually.

If that's the same guy who was in Event Horizon there's no way I'm going into space with him.

Or even watching it on TV

"Where we're going, we won't need eyes..."