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Exoplanet Found In Old Hubble Image
Kristina at Science News writes "A new way to process images reveals an extrasolar planet that had been hiding in an 11-year-old Hubble picture. After ground-based telescopes found three planets orbiting the young star HR 8799, a team took that information and reprocessed some 11-year-old Hubble Space Telescope images. Voila. There was one of the three planets, captured by Hubble but not visible until new knowledge could see the picture in a fresh light. The technique could reveal hidden treasures in many archived telescope images."
For reference, the first exoplanet to be (knowingly) directly imaged was 2M1207_b in late 2004.
is 20/20
... how many other unknown things are hiding in those old images.
Given that we only perceive a tiny slice of the electromagnetic spectrum, and rely on baryonic matter to map things out, and we're just starting to get good instrumentation, is this any surprise?
I'm regularly frustrated by the subtle hubris of completeness that underlies so many scientific assertions. It's as though we continually forget that science is fundamentally provisional, and that we're just hominids who only recently got refrigeration.
The nice thing about new techniques like this is that it points out that we are always missing something.
It's like the basic flaw in Fermi's paradox: why is it so hard to believe that there's a perfectly reasonable explanation for where everyone is, and we just haven't thought of it yet because it isn't obvious to hominids? Ockham's razor suggests for most things that we just don't have the answers, so keep looking, but for Fate's sake look away from the savannah-brain you're using.
Damn those pesky terrorists
Keep them coming! One more place to point the Gemini planet imager in 2010 http://gpi.berkeley.edu/index.html
Once we can do direct imaging, we can sample the planet spectra, and determine the atmosphere, composition, etc.
A picture is worth exactly 1024 words.
Its camouflage just broke for a minute!. I say we leave it well alone!
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
1- Gather data
2- Analyse data
3- ???
4- Profit!
5- New processing methods are found
6- Go to 2
They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security. --Ben Franklin
http: //images.celebritymoviearchive.com/members/thumbs/b/bM3410-MimiRogers@TheDoorInTheFloor.jpg
Not sure if that's exoplanet but it's got quite a terrain Copy, fix the colon space, and paste in browser. The archive won't let slashdot referrals in.
TFA says it works by "modeling" the distribution of the star's light halo and subtracting that modeled glow from the actual image. So basically it's just like fitting a radial distribution on the star and subtracting, am I right? We couldn't do that ten years ago? I hope there's more to it, and if there is, I'd be interested to hear more about it.
You just got troll'd!
Whenever anything interesting is discovered, people go to old surveys, old plates (the Harvard Sky Patrol from the 1930's tend to be especially useful) and old catalogs to see if people have seen it before. This is routinely done for asteroids, for example.
This is how Galileo's observations of Neptune in 1612 and images of the quasar 3C273 from the 1890's were found, for example.
This is so ironic -- we just found Hubble in our old exoplanet image. You little humans have come so far. You should be proud, at least for the next 40 hours...
Sincerely,
The Hostile Aliens
O
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... since knowing there's something there provides additional information that can be used to calibrate the extraction routine.
but not visible until new knowledge could see the picture in a fresh light.
This says it all. In fact, you could create a much simpler extraction technique consisting of a black box around the known item that meets this same standard. Can the new extraction technique do more than this? That, apparently, remains to be seen.
=======
Science -- Sealed, Delivered.
telescopic images
What's the best way to get into the field? Hah. Open ended question I know, but I've recently felt this stuff is a field I could work in that I might... actually enjoy.
The problem is, I don't want to go in the wrong direction and take a bunch of junk courses that have no pertinence to my end goal, or take a bunch of stuff that someone will later tell me doesn't count toward a proper degree.
I'm 25, almost 26. I never got a degree in Comp Sci because I knew, deep down, that I wouldn't find enjoyment in any of the dominant arenas of computer work (even tho I'm well versed in them, and everyone always said "go get your computer science degree!") I just felt wasting the money wasn't worth it, while everyone else saw no err in throwing money at something they weren't sure about. (Of the 6 or 7 people I know that got degrees in Comp Sci, the only one actually enjoying the field is one guy who didn't go to school for it at all. The rest are doing nothing relating to computers, and most feel they wasted their time [and $].)
Well now I have an idea of what I actually want to do, but I don't know what route to take.
Would one generally just get their Associates Degree first and go from there, or is there a better, more tailored route one could take?
Thanks for any input from the Slashdot crowd.
The Hubble telescope that is...
Dopeyish question, but are there any comprehensive or seminal texts dealing with the field of imaging (image resolution improvement) algorithms? This does not have to be limited to astronomy or still graphics.
As a side note, I find it kind of frustrating that tools like photoshop/gimp exist, and yet there doesn't appear to be texts dedicated towards using them to help resolve images that would otherwise not be apparent.
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
More interesting would be searching for unusual things, such as unexplained changes in a stars spectrum or luminosity. What might cause such a thing? A civilization playing around with things like a dyson sphere.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.