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Lowest Mass Exoplanet Ever Directly Imaged. Probably.
The Bad Astronomer writes "Astronomers announced today that they have taken a direct image of the lowest mass exoplanet ever seen. HD 95086 b has a mass about 4 to 5 times that of Jupiter, and orbits a star 300 light years away that is slightly more massive and hotter than the Sun. The planet is not 100% confirmed, but it appears very likely to be real. If so, it's a hot gas giant, still cooling from its formation less than 20 million years ago. The picture, taken in the infrared, clearly shows the planet, making it one of fewer than a dozen such planets seen in actual telescopic images."
It’s massive, so it’s almost certainly a gas giant like Jupiter, and it’s hot, probably about 730 C (1350 F) at the tops of its clouds.
-- Reality checks don't bounce.
In an atmosphere that crushes carbon into diamonds, pissing ice is probably the least of your worries, (which you wouldnt, pressure and gas laws and such).
To me the sad part is unless we can find some way around that pesky relativity thing this is probably as close as we are ever gonna get to it. If you look at a pic showing our position in the milky way we really are in the ass end of town with all the really cool stuff so far away from us it would take a trip longer than humans have existed just to go to the center.
maybe its just me but as someone who grew up watching Star Trek and Lost In Space every time they find a new planet i remember that we'll never ever get to see it in person and it just bums me out.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
A lot of these hot supermassive gas giants seem to be extremely young. I wonder what that says about planetary development. Do they lose mass after a billion or two years?
She can be directly imaged from 300 light years away.
What do they mean by lowest mass? Mass of Jupiter is 317 times the mass of earth and the planet they found has a mass 3 to 4 times that of earth.
Given that it orbits a star that's 300 light years away, it's probably still pretty cold! That's one huge orbit.
Twenty years ago, I though that there were relatively few exoplanets - only perhaps one in every few hundred systems having them - and even if there were one nearby, the chances of detecting it, ever, were small. Now we are knee deep in exoplanets, we know that large numbers of stars can have them, and we can even see them (probably). What I thought would never happen is fast transitioning from surprising to mundane.
Which just goes to prove the to Clarke's law, that almost nothing is impossible, in due course. Once we couldn't see them. Now we can see them, but fear we will never visit them. But history shows that visiting will come, in time - provided we have enough time.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
No need to be sad. Increasing effective aperture size of the telescope increases its resolving power. The imaging element doesn't have to be a single mirror or lens, but can consist of an array of elements scattered over a large area. Tricky part is getting all of the elements in phase agreement. Also doesn't have to be visible light. We are already 'imaging' surfaces of planets with synthetic aperture radar, operating on the same principle.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very_Large_Telescope
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very_Large_Array
So imagine a much larger optical array network, many miles in diameter, for imaging the surfaces of these exoplanets.
Being stuck in the outskirts of the unfashionable arm of the milky way does reduce our chances of being wiped out by gamma ray bursts, black holes etc though. You wouldn't want to live near most of the "interesting" parts of the galaxy.
Sublight self-replicating probes could explore the galaxy for us (eventually), although without FTL comms it would largely be a one-way message to any other intelligent races out there.
Well. Someone has to do it, I'll do it: to point out to you that the 300 light years are not the planetary orbit's radius, but the distance between Earth and that other planetary system. Tsheesh.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
... what with ever-increasing effective apertures and all, we are going to see earth-sized explanets within some 20 or 30 years, at least during my expected lifetime. Maybe we will, within that time, even have spectroscopic analyses of some of these planets' atmospheres: oxygen? no oxygen ? Water in gas phase ? Nobody would have ever imagined that when I was an adolescent. All of which is pretty exciting.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
But we may have deep-fried it, or possibly jerry-rigged it. We're just not certain at this stage. But imaging is definitely a possibility.
Truth in a headline. :-) I sped read the article, and it looks that they were alluding to the fact that it hasn't been confirmed as a planet. But after reading "How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming", would speculate that you could also say that images have been taken that are still being analyzed, or that both computer and human observations have glossed over that show planets.
Lowest mass exoplanet directly seen from the Earth
We don't know what aliens have seen orbiting other stars...
Well. Someone has to do it, I'll do it: to point out to you that the 300 light years are not the planetary orbit's radius, but the distance between Earth and that other planetary system. Tsheesh.
Indeed. Plus the article clearly states that as well. Talking about poor reading comprehension, hahaha :)
You didn't read his post, did you? He's sad we can't travel there, not that we can't get a picture of it.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Tsheesh? I would say Twhoosh, but to be fair it was a pretty poorly executed joke.
You will never get to see it, but we as a species might. We probably already have all the technology we'd need to build a world ship; we just need a promising place to go.
And a way to get rid of all those people who crop up on these stories blathering about how since humanity is the worst thing in the universe ever, it's our moral responsibility to stay on this planet until we achieve perfection.
Thanks, for those of us who grew up on Sci-Fi and Carl Sagan being shown all these incredible places we can never reach is like taking a starving man and showing him pictures of incredible meals, all it does is slap us in the face with the fact that thanks to relativity we will most likely never go beyond our tiny little solar system.
This is why I've started to actively avoid articles on new exoplanets and the like, life can be depressing enough without having someone constantly show you incredible places you can never get to.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I guess humans will be the voyeurs of the universe. Our telescopes will get better so we can watch those sexy aliens taking sonic showers or something.
No wonder everyone is avoiding our little space neighborhood. :)
Der Tod ist der einzige Weg hier raus!
Never ask scientists what future science will be like. Scientists spend all their time working within the current understanding of science, the best future science is always a little outside our current understanding.
We already have two distinct models for FTL that work within relativity, and we know of situations where relativity doesn't exactly apply. NASA is building a warp drive based on one of these models.
If we survive the next century we will be a space empire. Pack your bags :)