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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 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
But everyone knows that the Sun and the planets orbit the earth.
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.
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.
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.
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
This photo is just beautiful. Congratulations to the astronomers involved!
They built the Dyson sphere around the planet but _not_ around the star to capture all its energy? Someone needs to grab the picture of this and caption it "Ur doin it rong!"
This Space Intentionally Left Blank