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First Exoplanet To Be Seen In Color Is Blue
ananyo writes "A navy-blue world orbiting a faraway star is the first exoplanet to have its colour measured. Discovered in 2005, HD 189733 b is one of the best-studied planets outside the Solar System, orbiting a star about 19 parsecs away in the Vulpecula, or Fox, constellation. Previous efforts to observe the planet focused on the infrared light it emits — invisible to the human eye. Astronomers have now used the Hubble Space Telescope to observe the planet and its host star. Hubble's optical resolution is not high enough to actually 'see' the planet as a dot of light separate from its star, so instead, the telescope receives light from both objects that mix into a single point source. To isolate the light contribution of the planet, the researchers waited for the planet to move behind the star during its orbit, so that its light would be blocked, and looked for changes in light colour. During the eclipse, the amount of observed blue light decreased, whereas other colours remained unaffected. This indicated that the light reflected by the planet's atmosphere, blocked by the star in the eclipse, is blue."
Let's call this place "Eiffel 65".
I am officially gone from
I'm curious: what are the likely elements and molecules that would cause the blue reflection?
Helping with organizational effectiveness is our job.
Ah, but Neptune is named for a water god, which totally refutes your point and isn't a non-sequitur at all.
guess again, and RTFA
unless you're a Horta, then I could totally see that comment making sense
I mean, look at all this time and effort we're wasting on "science" and "discovery."
We need to get back to 16th century thinking and government funded services so my taxes can go down another $10 a paycheck. I mean, those cigarettes and premium cable TV channels aren't going to pay for themselves!
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
The planet has a surface temperature of about 1000 degrees Celsius. It is scourged by 7000 km/h winds. Pieces of silica, or if you prefer: glass, are flying around at supersonic speeds. And yes, it is the silica and the glass that give the planet its blue color. We should not call it Eiffel65. We should call it Philip.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
In other words, it's about 1.6 Kessel Runs? But how fast is that?
John
The redshift used to measure the speed of objects moving away from us applies primarily to the galaxy as a whole. If you were to normalize the light received to compensate for the redshift of the galaxy as a whole, the additional velocity of the planet, being negligibly small with respect to your new frame of reference would not significantly 'redden' your results. Good question though.
Common Sense (+1)
The planet isn't blue. The blue light that got blocked out by the host star was actually the trillions of blue LEDs that the natives use to light their cities, just because they happen to really fancy blue.
It seems improbable that a gas giant would
Does it seem improbable to you? Life on Earth evolved in a fluid.
Even if genesis is not possible in a gas giant atmosphere, large planets tend to have lots of moons and, therefore, lots of opportunities for primitive life to emerge. Extremophiles from such a moon could survive a short trip through space to a gas giant's atmosphere. Some small fraction of those would thrive and evolve in the new environment.
I suspect gas giant atmospheres may actually be very fertile. Life is good at producing simple sphere shapes needed for buoyancy. There are probably gas giants with billions of tons of biomass drifting around.
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
when a planet begins to transition behind its star, we would be seeing the bright sunward side of the planet, so the measure is still useful. We would only be seeing the full dark side of the planet when it passed in front of the parent star.