Slashdot Mirror
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."
The ESO is the European Southern Observatory, not Space Observatory.
. . . 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 . . .
So long and thanks for all the fish . . . !!!
how many megapixels does the hubble have?
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.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
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?
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.
Developers: We can use your help.
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."
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?
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
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.
The world is everything that is the case
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."
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.
-j
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.
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.
If the "planet" is still moving in concert with the star in a few months, then I'll believe it.
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.
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).
If I may say so, life is a game, and there's so much to do and so few turns.
-Reiner Knizia
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.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
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.
We're bouncing bloody lasers off the stuff they left there. What kind of proof people really need to believe we've landed?
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.