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

blinders

[gobbo]

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.

Gemini planet imager

[worip]

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.

Its a predator planet!

[Timesprout]

Its camouflage just broke for a minute!. I say we leave it well alone!

Re:I wonder ...

[meringuoid]

... 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.