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First Image of a Planet Orbiting a Sun-Like Star
Several readers including houbou and DigitumDei sent links to what may be the first-ever image of a planet orbiting a sun-like star (research paper). The giant planet, the mass of 8 Jupiters, orbits its star at 330 AU, or 11 times the distance to Neptune's orbit. If the imaged object does turn out to be a planet — and it's not certain it is — then theories of planet formation may have to be adjusted. "The bulk of the material from which planets might form is significantly closer to the parent star... The outermost parts of such disks wouldn't contain enough material to assemble a Jupiter-mass planet at the distance from the star... at which the Toronto team found the faint object."
Damn you, Google Star View! There IS such a thing as privacy, you know!
...and yet where's the second pic to prove that it orbits?
The Toronto people are just confused as to why the planet isn't orbiting around them.
O .
If the imaged object does turn out to be a planet â" and it's not certain it is â" then theories of planet formation may have to be adjusted.
Whereas if this thing that is bigger than 8 Jupiters turns out to be something other than a planet, we may have some other theories to adjust. But I, for one, welcome our giant space traveling overlords!
I've seen plenty of pictures of Earth.
I suspect that will be the case for many many decades/centuries, considering a current sample size of 9 +/- planets big enough to wobble their stars enough that we can see with current tech.
I suspect the more we resolve and catalog and the more we get direct observations of planets, the more the theories will change.
This is no longer the "first" directly observed extrasolar planet? What value of "first" is are we using now?
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
... that's no moon ...
StoneCypher is Full of BS
One can forgive the town that produced Rush for being a trifle arrogant.
The discovery was made using the 8m diameter Gemini Telescope - North on Mauna Kea. It's doesn't have Hubble's advantage of being in space, and so a clever approach is employed to eliminate interference from atmospheric turbulence. A laser is used to induce fluorescence in the sodium layer left by meteors up around 80 km altitude. -- this is called a "guide star" -- and adaptive (i.e., deformable) optics in the telescope bring the guide star image into sharp focus, and the rest of the scene with it. A guide star is used for this process rather than an actual star because it is much easier to adaptively image a bright object (which can also be positioned where needed). Such a clear image would otherwise not have been possible.
If you're of the opinion that we'll only find "life as we know it" on an Earth-like planet orbiting a Sun-like star in the habitable zone, then we haven't really got any data on how common their configuration is, so its a complete mystery how many civilizations like ours there are out there. Of course, if you're of the opinion that "as we know it" really isn't that important, then that's not entirely relevant.
Oh, and here's my exoplanet rant that I post every time one of these stories hits Slashdot.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Since all of the current theories about planetary formation around stellar objects consist of a statistical sample of one, I'd like to hope that Astro-physicists would be able to come up with some better theories when that sample size is increased.
One thing we do know from stellar observations is that binary or multiple star systems are much more common than solitary stellar systems like we have here around Sol. Even from observation of stellar nurseries it is also apparent that the physical structures that give rise to stars are born in highly complex environments of which our Solar System was likely a rather bland or even "ideal laboratory" example of how planetary systems were created.
Given the distance (330 AU... about 1/10th the same distance as between the Sun and Neptune) and if I were "betting" on what would be found with a planetary probe going to this star system, I think you would find nearly a complete planetary system around this gas giant as well, with this "planet" simply being in the Continuum between O-class blue giant stars and grains of sand.
Of course this observation of discovering a secondary system is based upon a sample size of 4 gas giants in our own solar system that all seem to have their own satellite systems as well. That is more like shooting fish in a barrel to make this sort of prediction.
Seriously, other than a highly simplistic planetary creation model, I fail to see what huge changes in formation theory this will actually make, other than to give more pause to think about how complex the stellar formation process might be.
A brown dwarf. Why do you say it like it should be obvious?
You just got troll'd!
Ridiculous! That picture is completely distorted! What paper are you looking at?
It was a lot more like this:
`O
As you can see from the nearly egg-like shape as the centrifugal forces compress the equator.
And if you observe that the planet orbits below the elliptical, you will have to agree that the planet was a rogue that was captured long after the star's formation.
If you look closely you can clearly see that it's just the USS Enterprise (NCC-1701-D) in "outer orbit" doing a routing scientific study. Nothing to see here, move along.
umm... IMO it should be called dwarfoid.
"Do you even know who I am?"
"Weren't you one of the Little Rascals?"
Assume I was drunk when I posted this.
roughly 11 times Neptuneâ(TM)s average distance from the sun..
As much as I'd like to quantify things in reference to Neptune, isn't there a planet your readers are more likely to associate with?
Modding me -1 troll doesn't make me wrong.
The star the planet is orbiting around is not a sun-like star. It is a K star, which is cooler and smaller in size than the Sun. I would argue that it is a planetary object near a star, period. It may not even be orbiting the damn thing. You would have to wait a few years to see if the star and the planetary object have common proper motion.
Wait, what is it called when something is too *big* to be a planet?
Rush Limbaugh. Har har.
I think your line of thinking is wrong based on this statement of yours:
"You hear all of this 'it works this way' crap in science, only a year later to hear 'oh it doesn't really work that way, we were right but not really right and now we're definately right'"
You rarely see widely accepted theories in science simply replaced. Instead they are refined. When a theory is widely accepted it is because it fits the evidence. If new evidence leads to a new theory than that new theory also has to explain the evidence that the prior theory did.
If you take planetary formation for example, it's a lot more then guesses. There is decades and decades of evidence that fit a widely accepted model. If this turned out to be something special, it would likely lead to a refinement of the current theory. There's no need to throw out the baby with the bathwater. The current theory fits the evidence. More then likely they'll find that either this isn't actually a planet orbiting the star or it's orbit is highly elliptical so you're jumping the gun anyways.
Personally, I think you're acting like what science knows today goes away tomorrow. And that isn't accurate. What science knows today stays. They just might know more tomorrow to make their theories even more detailed and accurate.
orbiting stars that are totally unlike the sun?
1) In the 1700's some French guy starts a list of objects that are in the sky that resemble comets, but are not. They are assumed to be relatively nearby objects. One has the name M31.
2) In the early 1900's some American guy comes along and looks a little closer at those objects, and finds not only are they not nearby, but they are entire islands of stars, and we live in one of those islands too! And M31 ends up being over 2 million light years away.
3) In the later part of the 20th century, an astronomical space based telescope, discovers the background variations in the left overs of the big bang, that led to the eventual location of these things now called 'galaxies'
Charles Messier, Edwin Hubble, and the COBE satellite would like to have a discussion with you about the scientific method.
In other words, yes. The theories on planet formation will change the larger the sample size gets. Just the same way the awareness and eventual theories of galaxies changed as they were observed more often and became part of a larger sample size - the known visible universe
That's not really true, strictly speaking, because "more detailed and accurate" sounds like mere refinement, and that's not really what happens. More accurately, tomorrow's theories are broadly consistent with those of yesterday (they have to be, because they need to support the same observations), but the underlying models can be utterly different from today to tomorrow.
For example, there is no inherent continuity between classical physics and quantum mechanics, beyond the fact that they both predict similar behaviour in their area of overlap. The underlying models are utterly different. The new one isn't just a refinement of the older one, but a fundamental change in underlying concept, and they just converge to yield roughly the same predictions.
This happens in all areas of science to different degrees, but especially in physics and chemistry where we don't *really* know the reality down at that level, but instead we merely talk about the behaviour of the elements in our model de jour, ie. the atoms and electrons and quarks and so on. We don't even know what mass is, so where there used to be empty space we conjure up quantum vacuum and Higgs bosons etc. The predictions we make remain broadly similar, but the models are not.
In other words, our models do not express continuity of understanding at all. That's under continuous change, not refinement. What does get more and more refined is the fit that our changing models make with our observations of reality. The correlations between theories and measurements get ever better, but "what science knows today" definitely "goes away tomorrow", because that knowledge is expressed through our models.
And that's what makes Science so interesting. If all we did was to refine our understanding rather than totally revise our theoretical models, Science would become more boring with each passing year, but there's no chance of that happening at all. :-)
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
And in the early 21st century, observations at the LHC and a new binocular radio telescope show conclusively that several assumed constants (Hubble constant, gravitational constant, age of universe, etc) were actually way off, and the stars are all really etched into a dome circling the earth about 300 miles up.
http://z.about.com/d/space/1/0/c/e/earth_moon.jpg
of an extrasolar planet. I think it would be amazing and hopefully spur people's imaginations to see beyond themselves.
Any astronomers out there care to speculate on the feasibility getting an image like this?
I don't understand why this would be so hard to understand. Many stars are found in binary or even trinary system. The closest stars (Alpha, Beta and Proxima Centauri) are a trinary system.
If full stars can form at a distance from each other in the same original gas cloud, why not a star and a 'failed star' or 'super jupiter'?
This photo is just beautiful. Congratulations to the astronomers involved!
We don't have to adjust the theories of planet formation because of this. It's simply a Dyson Sphere. The actual planet is much smaller than that.
I KNEW IT!
If the planet is a Super Jupiter and it's 330 au out, that star must be something like 100au, does anyone actually know? I couldn't see it in the article.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
It could very well be a Star!
It will be if it wins the next American Idol!
I am the richest astronaut ever to win the superbowl.
Oort Cloud object 2006 SQ372, a minor planet (http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/08/080819-new-planet.html) is 1600AU-2000AU out from Sol. By way of comparison, Sedna is 88AU.
Right now, it being 472 light years away (29,849,752 AU! or, 111 trips from Sol to Proxima Centauri...) we don't even know if it is a dual sun or not. Let alone what local conditions are like.
The heck with the Delta Quadrant! This this thing is FAR AWAY.
So personally, 330AU may not be irrational for a large solar system especially if the star in question has an overactive gravitational field or no nearby star systems to contend with. Our sun has 12 solar systems within 10 light years. Who knows what this star has to affect it?
46. The Hobo smiles, his eyes glaze over, and he burps. "Beware the man who has lived longer than the Wasteland."
Wasn't it "googol"? And from what I've heard, it wasn't coined by Sagan, but by the nephew(son?) of some mathematician. I guess Sagan invented googolplex though. Someone less lazy than me please Google for it.
Where is that guy who'd die defending what I had to say when I need him?