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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."
...but don't be misled by hyperbolic headlines.
Uhm yeah, we're pretty much at the wrong site for that advice...
Waiting for the first photograph of an exoplanet from an underwater observatory. And you though atmospheric refraction was a pain on land!
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.
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).
/. 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...
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