Three New Exoplanets Seen In Direct Photographs

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Three New Exoplanets Seen In Direct Photographs

Posted by timothy on Tuesday December 3, 2013 @03:53AM from the way-out-there-man dept.

The Bad Astronomer writes "Planets orbiting other stars are usually found indirectly (by blocking their stars' light or inducing a Doppler shift in the light as they orbit, for example), but direct images of exoplanets are extremely rare. However, using the 10-meter Keck telescope in Hawaii, astronomers have taken photographs of three nearby exoplanets, all young, massive, and hot. One may be massive enough to count as a brown dwarf, but the other two are more likely in the planet-mass range. All three are very far from their stars, which means they may have formed differently than the planets in our solar system."

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Young massive and hot. by P-niiice · 2013-12-03 04:00 · Score: 4, Funny

The OP was talking about planets, right?
1. Re:Young massive and hot. by TWiTfan · 2013-12-03 04:06 · Score: 1
  
  I hope not.
  
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2. Re:Young massive and hot. by Errol+backfiring · 2013-12-03 04:26 · Score: 2
  
  This is news for nerds. What else would he talk about?
  
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3. Re:Young massive and hot. by gstoddart · 2013-12-03 04:27 · Score: 2
  
  I'll be in my bunk. ;-)
  
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4. Re:Young massive and hot. by Anonymous Coward · 2013-12-03 05:00 · Score: 1
  
  I assume by massive and hot you are insulting my weight problem?
  SOME OF US CAN'T HELP IT MAN!
5. Re:Young massive and hot. by Anonymous Coward · 2013-12-03 05:46 · Score: 0
  
  One may be massive enough to count as a brown dwarf.
  Beauty is in the eye of the beholder :)
6. Re:Young massive and hot. by ThatsNotPudding · 2013-12-03 06:18 · Score: 2
  
  The OP was talking about planets, right?
  Or Honey Boo-Boo in August.
7. Re:Young massive and hot. by thefuz · 2013-12-03 09:35 · Score: 1
  
  Planets _can_ be hot, you know - just look at Jupiter. Oh, wait... you were talking about... ohhhhh. Right.
8. Re:Young massive and hot. by flargleblarg · 2013-12-03 10:20 · Score: 1
  
  Young, massive, and hot: Pick any two.
9. Re:Young massive and hot. by Valdrax · 2013-12-03 11:04 · Score: 1
  
  Ooh, someone's cruising for the party van to come pick them up!
  "No, officers, I was talking about temperature! I swear!"
  
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10. Re:Young massive and hot. by RespekMyAthorati · 2013-12-04 18:47 · Score: 1
  
  Or Uranus.
Galactic Spying by chinton · 2013-12-03 04:04 · Score: 1

I see the NSA is not content with spying on Earthlings...
1. Re:Galactic Spying by gstoddart · 2013-12-03 04:35 · Score: 1
  
  If they're unconcerned with spying on citizens of other countries on this planet, they're definitely not going to give a damn about those on other planets.
  
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How long until strong evidence for life? by Covalent · 2013-12-03 04:21 · Score: 2

These planets are directly observable with current technology. Within 10 years, one would imagine that smaller, nearer-to-the-star planets will be directly viewed...perhaps even spectroscopy on the planet's atmosphere will be possible. The James Webb telescope might be able to do some of this as soon as 2017.

That said, will we see strong evidence for life on another world soon? My guess is that an atmosphere with gases that simply don't belong there in large quantities (dimethyl sulfide, free oxygen, etc.) will be found sooner rather than later...and that will more or less wrap it up.

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1. Re:How long until strong evidence for life? by gstoddart · 2013-12-03 04:42 · Score: 2
  
  I think the threshold for 'strong' evidence will be in doubt for some time.
  Yes, if we see a lot of oxygen we might conclude it's possibly/probably life.
  But, the universe conspires to show us new and exotic things we can't quite figure out all the time -- if there's vast clouds of alcohol floating about in space, I think until we're actually directly looking at/talking with something, we'll only ever suspect there could be life.
  
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2. Re:How long until strong evidence for life? by Covalent · 2013-12-03 04:45 · Score: 1
  
  Good point. I suppose oxygen in an atmosphere isn't a dead lock that there's life there, although it wags its finger very suggestively.
  
  If we do find free oxygen in an atmosphere, though, you can bet all eyes will be trained on that planet. What kind of technology would be required to confirm the presence of life visually? Obviously radio signals or something like that would be a clincher, but suppose the life there is non-technological. Could we ever "verify" that there was life on that planet without going there or sending a probe (which is currently not feasible)?
  
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3. Re:How long until strong evidence for life? by gstoddart · 2013-12-03 05:05 · Score: 4, Interesting
  
  What kind of technology would be required to confirm the presence of life visually?
  If you'd asked anybody that 25 years ago they'd laugh and say it's impossible. My first thought is it still might be, but the jumps they've made in imaging over the last few decades are staggering. Now you can get as good resolution from ground-based telescopes as the ones in space, because the image processing has gotten so much better.
  It would be quite a feat to directly image life on a planet over vast distances and through atmospheres, so my complete and total guess is unless they've got something really large and obvious like city lights, we probably can't.
  
  Could we ever "verify" that there was life on that planet without going there or sending a probe (which is currently not feasible)?
  I can't speculate how, but I'm not an astro-physicist (or a physicists for that matter) ... for all I know some of the boffins are trying to figure out how they'd go about this. It certainly would be one hell of a feat.
  When I was in university and hung out with astrophysicists, the notion of detecting an exoplanet was still a bit of a stretch. Since then, we've inferred or directly observed so many it's astounding.
  
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4. Re:How long until strong evidence for life? by SuricouRaven · 2013-12-03 05:16 · Score: 1
  
  And the world will celebrate... for two days, until people realise that this 'life' isn't the type that talks, but most likely algae-like organisms, plants at best. Then the world goes back to watching celebrities do stupid things on television.
5. Re:How long until strong evidence for life? by Anonymous Coward · 2013-12-03 05:32 · Score: 1
  
  You're probably right - with millions of light-years between us, odds are they won't meet us while we're evenly matched. Either we discover the algae, or the gods discover us.
6. Re:How long until strong evidence for life? by Vitriol+Angst · 2013-12-03 07:06 · Score: 1
  
  I'd read some interesting articles about "using polarized light to determine chirality." Basically, the building blocks of our proteins are "right handed" (I think, I could get this flipped right here), a result of a yellow sun favoring certain right-handed outcomes in carbon molecules as they constantly get destroyed and re-attached in space and with radiation. Life is left-handed amino acids based upon the right-handed building blocks being more abundant. Due to this chirality, the light coming off our planet is polarized. Non-organic life doesn't have a chiral structure (if I'm using the word right), and therefore sunlight does not get polarized.
  This is just one discovery of many. The idea that we may be able to quickly "scan for life forms" from 300 light years away may be right around the corner. So it begs the question; any life forms out there a bit more advanced than us would probably be able to "scan for life. We've already seen numerous examples of patterns being reproduced and preserving information as a way to defeat entropy. WHY this happens is a matter of debate but that it happens is clear from crystals to bees.
  " It's not "if" but "why" have we not been contacted by higher life forms that should be the discussion -- not "if life exists".
  
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7. Re:How long until strong evidence for life? by Kjella · 2013-12-03 07:30 · Score: 2
  
  If we do find free oxygen in an atmosphere, though, you can bet all eyes will be trained on that planet. What kind of technology would be required to confirm the presence of life visually? Obviously radio signals or something like that would be a clincher, but suppose the life there is non-technological. Could we ever "verify" that there was life on that planet without going there or sending a probe (which is currently not feasible)?
  Visually, no that's impossible. One square meter of earth is hit with about 1600W or 5*10^21 photons from the sun every second. Even if you built a collector the size of the earth five light years away only 1 in 2.8*10^23 photons from that square meter would hit earth, meaning you'd never get the resolution to positively identify even a giant dinosaur. It's not a matter of technology, but of quantum physics. We'd need a probe to land, build a very powerful radio telescope that would operate a point-to-point link with earth to get any mug shots.
  
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8. Re:How long until strong evidence for life? by Anonymous Coward · 2013-12-03 08:46 · Score: 0
  
  Basically, the building blocks of our proteins are "right handed" (I think, I could get this flipped right here)
  More like confused than flipped. There are several different oppositions that have little to do with each other.
9. Re:How long until strong evidence for life? by Valdrax · 2013-12-03 11:11 · Score: 2
  
  It would be quite a feat to directly image life on a planet over vast distances and through atmospheres, so my complete and total guess is unless they've got something really large and obvious like city lights, we probably can't.
  The presence of large amounts of oxygen in an atmosphere would be a very, very strong indication, because oxygen doesn't stick around unbound to minerals and most gasses without something working very hard at separating it out. This holds true for any other highly reactive chemical that doesn't have any significant geological causes. We could find out by spectroscopy of the atmosphere.
  
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10. Re:How long until strong evidence for life? by Anonymous Coward · 2013-12-03 12:43 · Score: 0
  
  You won't be able to get an image of something that moves around a lot, but a long exposure takes you a lot further. Something like the Hubble deep field was a 30 hr exposure per color channel, while the extreme deep field was closer to three weeks. You're now talking millions of photons per square meter with your Earth sized telescope, or even dozens with one that is just 10 km in radius. If that were your only problem, you could image trees at least.
  But you are stuck with resolution limits unless you use a very large array of telescopes. A single Earth sized telescope would still be resolution limited to a couple kilometers at 5 light years away. To get anywhere near a 1 meter resolution at those distances, you would need to find a way to do interferometry over distances comparable to Earth's orbit.
11. Re:How long until strong evidence for life? by Anonymous Coward · 2013-12-03 19:48 · Score: 0
  
  ... if there's vast clouds of alcohol floating about in space ...
  No "if" about it, thats old news.
Is this correct? by Sir_Eptishous · 2013-12-03 04:46 · Score: 2

FTA:

FW Tau is perhaps the most interesting of the three systems. The star is actually a binary, two stars orbiting each other. Both stars are cool red dwarfs, about a quarter of the mass of the Sun each, orbiting about 1.6 billion kilometers (one billion miles) apart, roughly the distance of Saturn to the Sun. The stars are a bit less than two million years old, and are 470 light years from Earth.
Two Million? Really?

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1. Re:Is this correct? by Nyder · 2013-12-03 05:38 · Score: 1
  
  FTA:
  
  FW Tau is perhaps the most interesting of the three systems. The star is actually a binary, two stars orbiting each other. Both stars are cool red dwarfs, about a quarter of the mass of the Sun each, orbiting about 1.6 billion kilometers (one billion miles) apart, roughly the distance of Saturn to the Sun. The stars are a bit less than two million years old, and are 470 light years from Earth.
  Two Million? Really?
  No, I'm sure they meant 6k years old.
  
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2. Re:Is this correct? by SpaceIsBig · 2013-12-03 05:48 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  Yes, according to the arXiv article. It's located in a region of recent star formation.
How long until we get a time-lapse sequence? by wonkey_monkey · 2013-12-03 04:56 · Score: 4, Interesting

As awesome as this is, I'd love to see a time-lapse series of an exoplanet orbiting its star. I think that'd really drive home what we're looking at.

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1. Re:How long until we get a time-lapse sequence? by SpaceIsBig · 2013-12-03 06:11 · Score: 1
  
  How long until we get a time-lapse sequence?
  We might have a chance once the >30m telescopes start coming online (e.g. ELT). Up until then there's no chance, given these planets are at ~150-300 AU (5-10 times the radius of Neptune, who's orbital period is ~160 years) and therefore have orbit periods of thousands of years.
Re:"formed differently" by J'raxis · 2013-12-03 05:03 · Score: 1

For those wondering what this is.

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Surface features? by art6217 · 2013-12-03 05:05 · Score: 1

Is the shape of these dots representing merely the telescope's own artifacts? Will we be able to see clouds/continents of the largest exoplanets, if Phil Plait's prediction, that seeing Earth--sized planets is only a few years away, turns out to be true?
1. Re:Surface features? by Anonymous Coward · 2013-12-03 12:51 · Score: 0
  
  If you had a telescope 100 meters across, or multiple scopes doing interferometry on that scale, you would just be able to resolve the moon and Earth from ~4 light years away. To see something like that at these distances, 100s of light years away, you would need something 100 times bigger. To resolve something like the features of Jupiter with more than a couple pixels at those distances, you start getting to ~ 1000 km in size, requiring some array of satellites at that point. This would be even bigger if imaging in IR instead.
  Increasing ability to image planets at this point is more about distinguishing light from the planet from the star. There is a long way to go for different parts of the planet, short of crude methods like getting the light intensity as it revolves.
Re:"formed differently" by Anonymous Coward · 2013-12-03 05:06 · Score: 0

Also entirely consistent with the "God did it" theory.
That's nice... by Anonymous Coward · 2013-12-03 05:06 · Score: 0

...but to really impress me I'd like to see photos of Endoplanets.
1. Re:That's nice... by SuricouRaven · 2013-12-03 05:17 · Score: 1
  
  Look down.
Re:"formed differently" by Urkki · 2013-12-03 07:13 · Score: 1

yet entirely consistent with the electric universe theory.
Isn't the "electric universe" one of those things, which is consistent with anything? Impossible to falsify and therefore absolute truth?