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.

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

[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.

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

[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?"

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

[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.

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.

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."

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: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."

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.