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.

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: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."

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.