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Possible Baby Picture of a Giant Planet
astroengine writes "Acquired by the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (VLT), an infrared observation shows a portion of the disk of gas and dust around the star HD 100546, located 335 light-years away in the constellation Musca. By physically blocking out the light from the star itself by means of an opaque screen, the light from the protoplanetary disk around HD 100546 can be seen, revealing a large bright clump that's thought to be a planet in the process of formation (PDF). If it is indeed a baby planet, it's a big one — as large as, or perhaps even larger than, Jupiter."
Jupiter was soooo cute when it was just an asteroid. Just look at that little adorable red spot!
Table-ized A.I.
I was going to get annoyed at TFA for showing an 'artists conception' of the protoplanet but then I glanced at the paper. The pictures there look like a doughnut that ate a bunch of psilocybin. Had to squint and cross my eyes before I could figure out what the authors where talking about.
I want to see actual pixels, dammit.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
When I was a youth the idea that there were other planets in other solar systems was pure science fiction. Now we can an at least semi credible chance we we can actually directly see a planet in the making. At times like this I wish I was an astronomer instead for a living. I think this has got to be the golden age of astronomy that we are in now.
Think about it, we are in the age when books written, with good intentions, by well respected figures from even twenty years ago are so far out of date that they should not be used anymore. We have learned so much in the last twenty years it makes me wonder if we will ever again see a period of time like this in the future.
No kidding. What the hell is it with these science stories of astronomers finding a picture of something that require an artists impression of said picture to be up front and at the top of the article?
Astronomers take a picture of the accretion disk of a black hole. So here is a picture of what an artist thinks it looks like.
Astronomers take a picture of an earth sized planet light years away. So here is a picture of what an artist thinks it looks like.
Astronomers take a picture of a star getting devoured by a black hole. So here is a picture of what an artist thinks it looks like.
I hate to imagine what the artist's impression of the Pale Blue Dot photo would look like today.
Nap time story for a planet.
Goldilocks said, "This planet is too hot. This planet is too cold. But this planet is just right!"
Have gnu, will travel.
> What the hell is it with these science stories of astronomers finding a picture of something that require an
> artists impression of said picture to be up front and at the top of the article?
Because they don't find a picture in the first place? They find about ~100 pixels at best from a number of different wavelengths (usually not like what we can see to boot). Most people can't really understand what's going on in such images, and they aren't generally very interesting. The artist can take data from the various images and current theory and construct a picture that looks good and gives a more meaningful representation than the raw data.
Also, if you want the actual pictures just click the second or third links (the paper and another "science story" respectively). That's usually a given so it's a bit silly to complain about the practices of a few news outlets when people wanting the raw data can so easily find it.
In this particular case, though, I will grant you that the infrared picture is uncommonly scrutable and the artist's interpretation is particularly bad. The former has a lot to do, I'd expect, with this being a particularly distant planet (~47AU, about Pluto's maximum distance) so the interference from the star is more manageable. When it comes to the hot supergiants or maybe X-ray images of black holes, for example, they often have some value.
> I hate to imagine what the artist's impression of the Pale Blue Dot [wikipedia.org] photo would look like today.
I guess this is hyperbole because obviously what makes the Pale Blue Dot interesting is that it's a real photo from far away. There's no value in an artists interpretation because we already know what Earth looks like. If we didn't, though, and the Pale Blue Dot was the best image we had, I'd probably like to see an artists interpretation, based sampling spectographic information, distance from the sun, etc to come up with what the planet might look like.