First Four-Exoplanet System Imaged

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First Four-Exoplanet System Imaged

Posted by CmdrTaco on Monday December 13, 2010 @04:46AM from the space-is-really-big dept.

Phoghat writes "Among the first exoplanet systems imaged was HR 8799. In 2008, a team led by Christian Marois at the Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics in Canada took a picture of the system, directly imaging three giant planets."

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I got in before the Slashdotting by MyLongNickName · 2010-12-13 04:52 · Score: 5, Informative

For those who were not able to get in before the Slashdotting, here is a picture in text
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O
o
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1. Re:I got in before the Slashdotting by biryokumaru · 2010-12-13 04:58 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  And here's a picture in jpg at an image hosting mirror.
  
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Quite strange. by 140Mandak262Jamuna · 2010-12-13 04:54 · Score: 4, Interesting

When Galileo invented the telescope, pointed it to the sky and mapped more stars than anyone before him (or since, he still holds the record for the number of stars cataloged) most people objected saying, "well this tube seems to be showing many interesting things. But what is the guarantee it is showing the real thing? What if it is producing illusions?". Even when pointed to terrestrial objects and showed that it is always showing the real thing, there were doubts. His lenses had terrible spherical aberration and chromatic aberration and had very heavy rainbow fringes on bright objects and things were shown upside down. One could almost forgive the bishops and the cardinals distrusting the instrument, and saying they will believe only things that they can see with their eye.
Fast forward 400 years, images captured on a charge coupled device producing pixels from light gathered by giant telescopes is considered "direct imaging" and is somehow more reliable and more worthy of our trust than the Doppler shifts, wobbles and loss of brightness due to osculation!

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1. Re:Quite strange. by Daniel+Dvorkin · 2010-12-13 05:07 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  loss of brightness due to osculation
  It is true that once the serious making out begins, higher mental function tends to shut down, but I don't think that was quite what you meant.
  
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2. Re:Quite strange. by Red+Flayer · 2010-12-13 05:08 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  is somehow more reliable and more worthy of our trust than the Doppler shifts, wobbles and loss of brightness due to osculation!
  WTF is osculation?
  
  From Webster's:
  
  osculum (äskyoo lm, -ky-)
  noun pl. oscula -la (-l)
  any of the openings of a sponge though which water passes out
  Are you suggesting that the images have been passed through the pisser of a sponge?
  
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3. Re:Quite strange. by Kjella · 2010-12-13 05:13 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  Trust is not so important as being reproducible and verified by multiple methods. There's no explicit reason to distrust "doppler shifts, wobbles and loss of brightness due to osculation" but it's good science to say "Well, if what we're measuring is the result of a planet, we should be able to do X and see the planet directly. If we don't, there's something wrong. That it has been correct for near star systems give credibility to the other methods that they'll be correct for distant star systems. Sometimes you have to accept single-source results because it's the world's largest and most sensitive telescope or most powerful particle accelerator or things like that, but it's not ideal to leave it at that. Verifying results is a lot less glorious than making the discoveries in the first place, but it's an important part of science.
  
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4. Re:Quite strange. by SplashMyBandit · 2010-12-13 05:33 · Score: 2
  
  Don't forget gravitational microlensing as a technique!
5. Re:Quite strange. by AaronParsons · 2010-12-13 05:53 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  It is all rather miraculous, how far scientific instrumentation has come, but I'm not quite sure what you're getting at with:
  
  is considered "direct imaging" and is somehow more reliable and more worthy of our trust than the Doppler shifts, wobbles and loss of brightness due to osculation!
  This is "direct imaging", because it is directly measuring the spatial distribution of photons arriving from this system, even if it is done with mirrors and CCDs, and not your eye. This sets this measurement apart from the other techniques you have described for inferring the presence of planets from their gravitational pull on the host star.
  As for "somehow more reliable", I don't think there's any need for hand-wavy words like "somehow". All of these measurements you mention have error bars (and it should be a crime that any scientific press release be allowed to drop the error bars when reporting). Simultaneously fitting for four separate orbits (including distance from star, mass of planet, inclination of orbit, etc) for this many planets means there is substantial covariance between the parameters you are fitting for. Direct imaging, on the other hand, only has to stand out relative to the noise background. It is hard to judge from the color scale of the images, but these look like easily >5sigma detections of each planet.
6. Re:Quite strange. by beelsebob · 2010-12-13 06:41 · Score: 2
  
  I don't see how directly measuring the spatial distribution of photons arriving from the system is any different from directly measuring the frequency distribution over time of photons arriving from the system, or directly measuring the number of photons arriving from the system.
  We seem to put higher credence on one method because it's the method our eye uses to measure something.
7. Re:Quite strange. by AaronParsons · 2010-12-13 07:29 · Score: 2
  
  We do put a lot of credence on imaging as people, but this breakthrough discovery doesn't have that same problem. It's not like we waited to discover exoplanets until we imaged them directly. That discovery happened a decade ago, and was done using the pull of a planet on its host star.
  
  Imaging is a powerful step forward. Localization matters. You've piled up all of the signal associated with a planet in a bin, where that signal is very easy to differentiate from background signals and from noise. There is no doubt that the image shown in this case that four planets exist. That kind of confidence is hard to get from fitting the 4-way pull of those planets on a host star over a period of many years.
8. Re:Quite strange. by slick7 · 2010-12-13 09:03 · Score: 2, Informative
  
  When Galileo invented the telescope,
  
  More like re-invented.
  Ecclesiastes 1:9
  
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Let's not ignore the oceans by bogaboga · 2010-12-13 04:54 · Score: 4, Interesting

The oceans are about 5% explored. More resources should be geared toward the oceans as well.
You never know...we might find some creature under there that has some complex protein mankind could use to treat chronic diseases like diabetes, AIDS and the like.
How'z that?
1. Re:Let's not ignore the oceans by biryokumaru · 2010-12-13 05:08 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  Meh, thanks to us, in a few hundred years the oceans will be too acidic for any of those critters to survive. Seems like a safer bets to point ourselves outward in the hopes of avoiding a similar fate for ourselves.
  
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2. Re:Let's not ignore the oceans by TheRaven64 · 2010-12-13 06:26 · Score: 2
  
  Unless the Ancients hid a Stargate under the water...
  
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A better link: Herzberg Institute directly by thomasdz · 2010-12-13 05:00 · Score: 4, Informative

I hope this doesn't cause a slashdotting of the Herzberg Institute, but...
http://www.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/eng/news/nrc/2010/12/08/exoplanet-marois.html

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1. Re:A better link: Herzberg Institute directly by mcgrew · 2010-12-13 07:28 · Score: 2
  
  The planets orbit the star HR 8799, which lies about 129 light years from Earth and is faintly visible to the naked eye
  If there are any post-industrial intelligences there, they should be hearing our radio signals -- morse code from the 1800s. Has SETI been looking at them?
  
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No. by Arker · 2010-12-13 05:34 · Score: 3, Informative

The subject is system. System is singular, "system is" correct.

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Re:Once the tech process gets better... by hoggoth · 2010-12-13 05:34 · Score: 2

Our breathable atmosphere didn't happen by accident. Earth had the same toxic mixture I expect we'll find elsewhere until early life started exhaling Oxygen and changing our atmosphere into the cozy blanket we call home.

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Re:Once the tech process gets better... by pyalot · 2010-12-13 05:38 · Score: 2

Capturing direct light from earth sized planets is extremely important. Spectral analysis could reveal free oxygen (which would mean life), environmental pollution (which would mean civilization) etc. Also if they manage to crank the resolution up, way up, we might be able to directly observe the surface structure of said planets (and any anomalies they might contain, like cities, etc.) It sure would be good to at least know you've got neighbors, and perhaps aim some comlink at them, maybe we might learn stuff nobody thought of before, or come to more humbling insights about our existence to quieten those annoying creationist trolls (though I doubt that exobiology would quieten them any bit).

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Re:Once the tech process gets better... by macson_g · 2010-12-13 05:53 · Score: 5, Interesting

Let me remind you of the old anti-space colonization argument: The Gobi desert HAS a breathable atmosphere and I don't see people living there.
would help the likes of SETI even without detail by KingAlanI · 2010-12-13 07:00 · Score: 2

Seems like it would help the likes of SETI even without those details; we could aim/to from plausible planets rather than aiming randomly through the universe. And we could narrow our aim with more information even if we don't have full information.

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Re:Once the tech process gets better... by eleuthero · 2010-12-13 09:15 · Score: 2

It might indeed be arrogance to suggest that life could only exist in an earth-like environment. Going on the statement by hoggoth (parent to my first post), he is suggesting that life on earth exists as it does now only because of prior life adjusting our atmosphere. If we found a planet with an atmosphere similar to our own (and hoggoth is correct), then it might be safe to assume there was life of some kind (again, this is based in a lot of assumptions).

Given politics in the US, it would seem then that if a planet were thought to have life, the establishment would want to have the ability to get there and investigate it at the earliest possible opportunity to determine threat mitigation responses.

It is entirely possible that your scenario of another form of life might be missed entirely by present researchers (and the camera hungry politicians who fund them). It is also possible that they would not. I am not suggesting that there is no other form of life besides earth's nor am I am suggesting that there is (both would seem to be fairly arrogant assumptions).