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Exoplanet Found In Old Hubble Image

Posted by Soulskill on from the old-but-new dept.

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.

18 of 54 comments (clear)

  1. I wonder ... by Extremus · · Score: 2, Insightful

    ... how many other unknown things are hiding in those old images.

    1. Re:I wonder ... by meringuoid · · Score: 5, Interesting
      ... how many other unknown things are hiding in those old images.

      Probably millions. It's called 'precovery' - very often, once you discover something new, you'll find that it has already been photographed half a dozen times and been completely ignored. Consider the planet Neptune, discovered in 1846: it turns out that it had already been observed by Galileo, twice, in the course of his studies of Jupiter. He mistook it for a star, although he noted that it appeared to move very slightly relative to other stars.

      --
      Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
    2. Re:I wonder ... by jschen · · Score: 3, Informative

      Probably lots. In all fields of science, major discoveries often do not get credited to the first person (or instrument, in this case) to observe something. The credit goes to the first person who both recognizes the significance of what they observed and shares with the world. Newton was not the first to observe objects falling down. He was the first to truly understand the scientific significance of that observation. Fleming was not the first to observe the antibacterial properties of Penicillum mold (which led to the development of penicillin). He wasn't even the first to document it. But he was the first to follow up on it in a major way.

    3. Re:I wonder ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

      ... how many other unknown things are hiding in those old images.

      Hey, I found Waldo!

  2. blinders by gobbo · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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
    1. Re:blinders by TapeCutter · · Score: 4, Insightful

      "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.

      --
      And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
    2. Re:blinders by wjh31 · · Score: 4, Informative

      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

    3. Re:blinders by andereandre · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I'm regularly frustrated by the subtle hubris of completeness that underlies so many scientific assertions.

      I don't think science is to blame for that, but the oversimplified reporting of it. No serious scientist assumes completeness.

    4. Re:blinders by Shark · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

      --
      Mind the frickin' laser...
  3. Gemini planet imager by worip · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.
    1. Re:Gemini planet imager by fmobus · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Not really. Interestellar travel, is hardly rewarding from an economic standpoint. SeeKrugman's work.

  4. Its a predator planet! by Timesprout · · Score: 5, Funny

    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
  5. What's the new method like? by 4D6963 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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!
    1. Re:What's the new method like? by ogre7299 · · Score: 2, Informative

      You have the basics right. But it gets complicated because anything in the light path between the star light going into the telescope until it hits the detector is going to contribute to the point spread function, or point response function. Which is basically the diffraction pattern made by a point source on the focal plane. Hubble's PSF can be a bit more complex because of the corrective optics in each instrument.

      You are right that we could do this 10 years ago, but we probably have a much better model for the point spread function now than we did then.

    2. Re:What's the new method like? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      The algorithm - called LOCI - is indeed slightly more sophisticated ;-)
      You can find more in the paper by Lafrenière et al. ( 2007, ApJ 660, 770-780)

  6. This is an old astronomical technique by mbone · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:This is an old astronomical technique by mbone · · Score: 4, Informative

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

  7. Hmmm... by DamienRBlack · · Score: 4, Funny

    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