First Four-Exoplanet System Imaged

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."

Comments

I got in before the Slashdotting

[MyLongNickName]

For those who were not able to get in before the Slashdotting, here is a picture in text

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Re:I got in before the Slashdotting

[biryokumaru]

And here's a picture in jpg at an image hosting mirror.

Quite strange.

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

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!

Re:Quite strange.

[Daniel Dvorkin]

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.

Re:Quite strange.

[Red Flayer]

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?

Re:Quite strange.

[Kjella]

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.

Re:Quite strange.

[AaronParsons]

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.

Let's not ignore the oceans

[bogaboga]

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?

Re:Let's not ignore the oceans

[biryokumaru]

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.

A better link: Herzberg Institute directly

[thomasdz]

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

No.

[Arker]

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

Re:Once the tech process gets better...

[macson_g]

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.