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.

Comments

Re:blinders

[wjh31]

We can only perceive a tiny slive of the EM spectrum, but we've built telescopes capable of maping the night sky from the radio of the CMB to the high energy gamma ray bursts, and everything in between

Re:This is an old astronomical technique

[mbone]

Of course, the really cool things about such prediscovery observations of a planet is that they will really help to nail down the orbit.