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

[TapeCutter]

"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..."

There is no "flaw" in Fermi's paradox, it's an observation of an inconsistency designed to make one think about what we are missing.

Re:blinders

[Shark]

One of the major problems with Ockham's razor is a tendency that we have to assume that we have all the facts when we apply it.

Otherwise, it's a great tool.