Exoplanet Reports Exaggerated

The Bad Astronomer writes "The reports of the first direct picture of an exoplanet are misleading. The real news is that an image of a probable exoplanet taken in 2008 using a telescope in Hawaii have been confirmed — it's a planet. In fact, exoplanets have been directly imaged before; the first was in 2005. More images of other planets were released in 2008. To be specific: this new planet is the first to be directly imaged orbiting a sun-like star using observations made from the ground. That's actually still quite a technological achievement, but don't be misled by hyperbolic headlines."

Comments

This is /.

[sribe]

...but don't be misled by hyperbolic headlines.

Uhm yeah, we're pretty much at the wrong site for that advice...

Re:This is /.

[sribe]

Actually, isn't Slashdot the perfect place for such a warning? You put "Watch for crossing deer" signs near places where deer cross frequently, not where it seldom happens!

Good point. I cede to you superior word skills ;-)

Periscopic Photographs

[PurpleCarrot]

Waiting for the first photograph of an exoplanet from an underwater observatory. And you though atmospheric refraction was a pain on land!

Re:Periscopic Photographs

[JWSmythe]

Ya, it's always "blow up the evil base", "destroy his equipment", etc, etc. Don't they realize it's advantageous to loot the evil base for technology and resources? The badguy always has some spiffy superweapon that borders on physically impossible. ... or is that how Batman gets a spiffy new car in every movie?

    I still want to take the "Tumbler" for a drive.

Exaggerated

[dimethylxanthine]

Exoplanet Reports Exaggerated

Well yeaaahh - did you see the original picture? Glad that got cleared up :)

That being said, it did provide some great amusement value too: image

Re:Slashdot: Don't believe everything you read on

[MozeeToby]

To be fair, if you browse the comments after things have settled down a bit you generally get the corrections long before most other sites get around to posting corrections (if they ever do). There were several comments in the earlier article that were rated up that say... well, basically exactly what this article says.

Thanks Slashdot!

[Daetrin]

Thank you Slashdot, for letting us know that all those other sites that were exagerating the importance with hyperbolic headlines were totally doin it rong!

(To be fair it's usually considered a sign of maturity to be able to admit that you made a mistake after the fact, but just i couldn't resist the dig. Guess i'm not mature enough.)

Re:What is this "exaggerated" bs?

[CheshireCatCO]

Wow, you didn't even read the summary above, did you? The summary pretty nicely explains what's been done and what's new here, even without reading the linked piece Phil wrote. It really doesn't take much effort in this case.

Also: insulting Phil Plait's ability to get to the real source and read it makes you look like a fool. Phil is a PhD'ed astronomer and one of the most active and followed astronomy popularizers in the field today. Telling him to go to S&T or Astronomy is insulting.

Re:What is this "exaggerated" bs?

[bmo]

Please mod this down. I don't know what I was thinking.

--
BMO

Re:The summary is actually perfectly fine

[Chris Burke]

I'll forgive you then, since after all if I was on the jury for your murder trial I'd let you off with the "lack of coffee defense".

Sorry Bad Astronomer but you're partly wrong

[superluminique]

I'm an astrophysicist and yes I find that most press releases about astronomy are somewhat exaggerated and have hyperbolic titles (it's probably true for anything about science). The obvious reason for that is to make them more attractive to the lay reader. I guess that something like "Imaging of 1RXS 1609 Companion Using Speckle Subtraction" would make people run away. Of course, there should be a compromise between sensationalism and news but it's not always obvious how to spin things the right way, especially when news writers barely know anything about science (believe me, I've had to deal with explaining relativity to the media).

Regarding this discovery, I don't agree with Bad Astronomer who seemed to have found a way to bash about "exaggerated scientific news" (as I said I do agree with him on the general statement). The other star that Bad Astronomer claims has been imaged in 1995 is Formalhaut. Yes, there is a point source somewhere in the debris disk around the star that is a planet. The thing is that this planet was only found last year, in a recent Hubble image. Astrophysicists saw it in the recent image and went back to the archives and also identified it in the 1995 archive image.

The exoplanet of the present discovery, around the star 1RXS 1609, has been found with direct imaging prior to the detection of the one around Formalhaut. I won't get into the details but all evidence were showing that it was an exoplanet orbiting that star. Of course, there is always a small chance of coincidence but the confirmation just came about -- this is what the news is about -- since clear orbital motion is now visible. So, technically, 1RXS 1609b was the first exoplanet to be formally identified using direct imaging, though Formalhaut's exoplanet had been photographed before without people recognizing it. Off course, this whole /. and Bad Astronmer's news is all about nitpicking on words. It's even hard for astrophysicists to unambiguously decide which one should be first. My last sentence would simply be that this /. post title "Exoplanet Reports Exaggerated" is totally hyperbolic and exaggerated since I was sure that it was reporting about something really bad like half the exoplanets are in fact not real or something like that...

Re:Sorry Bad Astronomer but you're partly wrong

[superluminique]

Good point CheshireCatCO and I got stressed about talking too fast so I went and read the actual papers.

The thing is that this planet was only found last year, in a recent Hubble image. Astrophysicists saw it in the recent image and went back to the archives and also identified it in the 1995 archive image.

2004, according to Phil. And unless he's deliberately being misleading, they were in fact looking for the planet:

The 2004 actually refers to a 2005 Nature paper (A planetary system as the origin of structure in Fomalhaut's dust belt), presenting the modelling of the debris disk which strongly suggests that a planet has to be there. There is no mention of any candidate point source in the image.

(I, for one, can recall people identifying locations where a planet ought to be in that disk as early as Fall 2002. So it's credible to me that they'd be looking with HST in 2004.)

Granted, they didn't announce it right away. But, then, that's also the basis for you claim for priority of 1RXS 1609, so it seems like Phil is still right.

Of course, from the 2005 paper and strong prior evidence, they decided to follow up on the source and got images in 2006 and in 2008. Unless I missed the article there is not paper identifying a point source in the image as a candidate planet until the 2008 Science paper announcing the discovery of a planet around Formalhaut (Optical Images of an Exosolar Planet 25 Light-Years from Earth). If there was a peer-reviewed paper, it would be cited in the 2008 Science paper and, moreover, it is logical there is none since 1. they didn't want to be scooped, 2. they had to be cautious until the discovery was confirmed.

So even if people saw speckles in the debris disk of Formalhaut, it would have been difficult to claim them as planets unless spectroscopy would confirm or proper motion as it ended up being the case. In the case of 1RXS 1609, things are different since not only was there an optical detection but also a spectrum. The spectrum clearly showed it was a planet but could not unambiguously tell that it was gravitationally bounded to the star because of the lack of proper motion. So regardless of whether or not the planet was gravitationally bounded to the star (say, it could have been ejected from another system and just being running away), it still would have been, arguably, the first direct detection of an exoplanet.

Anyway, as everyone can see, the whole thing relies on what the definition of "first" is. Is it first published detection? First recorded image that shows it? etc. In any case, Phil does good work and I appreciate it. I just found that, ironically, the news about the news was being made a bit too spectacular.

Re:Sorry Bad Astronomer but you're partly wrong

[superluminique]

Sorry, I forgot to include the link to the 1RXS 1609 papers: the original "discovery" paper and the "confirmation" paper. So to answer your question, no this isn't the first publication about 1RXS 1609, the 2008 one did announce the discovery. And I don't think I'm changing my argument. Not sure exactly what the "boo" about published papers means but in my first post, when I talk about discoveries and findings I implicity (sorry if I didn't make it clear) refer to literature. Here, the point is simply that if someone noticed anything around Formalhaut before the 2008 paper, it hasn't been published or announced so then it's kind of irrelevant. Of course, it's irrelevant to the extent of what one considers a "first".

Anyways, one would probably agree that arguing about it is a bit pointless because there is no clear answer and it just becomes circular after a while. I personally know many of the authors on both the Formalhaut and the 1RXS 1609 teams, and I can say that I've witnessed very good ethics from them. For instance, during a talk one of them would refer to the discovery as the "first" with quotation marks and mention the other one as also being the "first". One last remark is that fact that peer reviewed journals usually forbid the use of words like "first" and such. Science and Nature are very strict about it and it's certainly a good thing because it alleviates unneeded arguments ;-)

Re:Sorry Bad Astronomer but you're partly wrong

[superluminique]

The actual printed publication of 1RXS 1609 came out after that of Formalhaut but the results came up earlier. The reason being that Science and Nature (Formalhaut's was published in Science) have a much quicker turn around from the time the paper is initially submitted to the point where it comes out of press (it depends but it can be something like a month), whereas more specialized journals like the Astrophysical Journal in which 1RXS 1609's was published are extremely long (several months). Of course, no one in the field waits for the printed paper; typically they are put on ArXiV way before, most of the time after they have been accepted so that the authors know it has been referred and won't be modified further (there are still a few months between the time the paper gets accepted and it gets published). So, the 1RXS 1609 discovery came out and made up the headlines before, though again everything can be argued and I personally think it's pretty much a tie game. Bottom line, I don't say that Phil is all wrong, all I'm saying is that things are a bit more complicated that they look like. I hope it can help you understand. Cheers.

Re:What is this "exaggerated" bs?

[The Bad Astronomer]

Well, it's not insulting. I've written for both magazines! :) However, my source was the news release from Gemini, as well as a few previous articles I had written on this topic as well as this particular object.