First Direct Photo of Exoplanet Confirmed

An anonymous reader noted a report confirming the first ever exoplanet actually photographed from telescopes on earth. Every other exoplanet so far 'observed' has been done by measuring wobbles of stars pulled by planetary gravity. But this one is a photograph. And that's just plain cool.

Comments

As Wil Wheaton often says

[Pojut]

Damn, I love living in the future.

Re:As Wil Wheaton often says

[The MAZZTer]

But you wrote that comment in the past!

Re:As Wil Wheaton often says

[commodore64_love]

And I hate living in a pre-warp culture. Come on scientists. Invent a warp drive so instead of taking blurry images, we can send a camera to that distant planet and take a photo directly.

I don't know. Maybe this is why aliens have never contacted us? Maybe they are stuck inside their local solar system, same as we are, and the distance between stars is just too big a hurdle to jump. I once read a Science story about humans that hopped on a giant ship and accelerated to llghtspeed to visit a star with an earthlike planet. The humans inboard only aged two years, but 150 years passed-away back home..... whole countries rose and fell during that timespan. Totally impractical way to explore.

Re:As Wil Wheaton often says

[chichilalescu]

as a PhD student in physics, the interstellar travel mechanism closest to being theoretically possible that I've seen so far is the Infinite Improbability Drive.

Photo dates from 2008

[mbone]

The key word in the title is "confirmed." Readers may remember that there were 2 separate sets of planets photographed in papers published in 2008. Now, we are sure (not that there was much doubt) that one of them is truly orbiting its primary star.

Re:Photo dates from 2008

[Rogerborg]

Well, if you want to get technically correct - the best kind of correct - then the title should be "First Confirmation of Direct Photo of Alien Planet", not "First Direct Photo of Alien Planet Finally Confirmed", since it most certainly is not the first direct photograph of an alien planet.

We photographed many, many alien planets before this one: every time anyone pointed a camera at the sky, in fact. We've just not spotted any planets in those other images (yet).

Re:Photo dates from 2008

[sorak]

We just need to use the good old CSI zoom and enhance! We'll find many more!

But won't they all be covered in semen and blood stains?

Adaptic optics FTW

[OneAhead]

I see this as a big triumph of adaptic optics. This picture was not made by a space telescope, but by an earth-based one!

Re:Adaptic optics FTW

[eldavojohn]

I see this as a big triumph of adaptic optics. This picture was not made by a space telescope, but by an earth-based one!

Indeed, hope the liquid mirror option becomes practical and viable so we can achieve more amazing photographs and data like this. Although I have to wonder why they didn't use an orbiting satellite like Hubble to avoid Earth's atmosphere when photographing such an amazing thing. Have terrestrial adaptive optic solutions already caught up with orbiting satellites?

Re:Because we can't see Venus at night....

[Buggz]

Is there some weird definition of "Alien" that I dont know of?

Usually it means extra-terrestrial, but in this case they mean extra-solar (a word also used in the article). I'll assume the guy who came up with the headline is not the guy who wrote the article.

Pluto

[Ukab the Great]

There's an irony in that we can now see extrasolar planets but we still can't get a really decent the smallest (dwarf)planet in our solar system.

Re:Because we can't see Venus at night....

[Chrisq]

Alien, in this context, = outside of our solar system. As in too far for you to take a picture.

You are making quite an assumption about where the GP poster lives and is posting from. Beam me up dismiley!

Other Direct Images of Exoplanets Exist

[rwllama]

There are several direct images of exoplanets available. Hubble took one of a planet around Fomalhaut, which was announced the same day that Keck announced three planets around HR 8799 (Nov 13, 2008). The next week, ESO announced a possible planet around Beta Pictoris, which has recently been confirmed. What these folks at Gemini are saying is that they announced a possible direct image earlier in 2008, which they have now confirmed, so theirs was really the first. It is a game of "who got the first direct image of a planet around another star?". It doesn't really matter, but it is very cool that we can now directly see not only the 8 planets in our solar system, but also at least 6 more in other solar systems. At some pivotal point in the near future we will have more pictures of planets outside our solar system than within it!

Re:How big a telescope do we need to see cities?

[rwllama]

OK - Here's the math ...

100 light-years = 1 quadrillion kilometers -- You want a 1 meter resolution at that distance, so you need an angular resolution alpha, where tan(alpha) = 1 / 10^18 --> alpha = 5.7 x 10^-17 degrees

Let's use Hubble as a scaling proxy. It has a 2.5 meter mirror and 1/20th of an arc second resolution. Converting units, that resolution is 1 / (20*60*60) = 1.4 x 10^-5 degrees. Now, simply scale to get the desired resolution and you have the diameter of the mirror = 2.5 * 1.4 x 10^-5 / 5.7 x 10^-17

The diameter you want is 614 million kilometers, or more than 4 times the distance between Earth and the Sun. Good luck building that.

Why bother

[MacGyver2210]

When I went to click on this link, I told myself "This better not just be another glowing dot". As usual, I was severely disappointed.

Also, 500 Light Years?

So even if we achieve FTL travel it's gonna be 40 lifetimes before we get there, not including the time to send any information back? This is where potential space travel funding is going?

Very sad.