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Space Science

Extra-solar Planet Imaged 36

Posted by michael from the icu dept.
bdb111 writes "European astronomers have taken what may be the first picture of an extra-solar planet. The possible planet orbits a brown dwarf star 230 light years away."
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Extra-solar Planet Imaged More

Extra-solar Planet Imaged

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  • Fantastic and cool. The only question I have is...where the hell is it? no where in the article could I find where to point a telescope to see it. I hope, for scientific verification, other astronomers have access to that information somewhere.

    What's a little disappointing is that this planet is orbiting a brown dwarf, which isn't really a star...but its a start!

    • Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Friday September 10, 2004 @12:54PM (#10213893)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Re:Awesome! (Score:5, Informative)

        by Shigeru ( 598706 ) on Friday September 10, 2004 @06:05PM (#10217156) Homepage
        The preprint of the paper [eso.org] lists the parent brown dwarf as 2MASS J12073346-3932539 , which is indeed at the above coordinates. The candidate planet (much in the same way Ralph Nader is the candidate president, but there's my bias showing) will be 0.46 arcseconds south and 0.63 arcseconds east.

        In case I didn't discourage any amateur astronomers thus far, here's some more: That's a separation of 0.77 arcseconds, when the seeing at most sites is of order 1 arcsecond. The companion is 100 times brighter than the parent brown dwarf in the K band. The parent brown dwarf has a K of about 12, and for an M8 spectral type, that's a V-magnitude of about 19 or 20. For those of you scoring at home, the parent brown dwarf is one million times fainter than anything you can see with the human eye.

        The companion is an even redder object, so the colors will be much, much worse at V (there's a reason we try to detect these in the infrared). With a state-of-the-art AO system (look what we did with the same system earlier this year imaging the surface of Titan [eso.org]) on an 8 meter telescope with excellent infrared detectors, the companion lies one magnitude above the detection limit on their sensitivity/separation curves.

        Sorry to depress people looking forward to pointing your telescope at this system tonight, but if it makes you feel better, it's probably not a planet.

        I just checked that RA, by the way. It's behind the sun right now. You'll have to wait until January to observe it. Or to point your telescope there and not observe it, as the case may be.
        • Thanks for the interesting analysis. The article sez, "An analysis of its emissions found it contains water, which suggests its mass is in the range of planets rather than stars." (That's from the article; for some reason the preprint didn't render for me.)

          If the red object is a star, could it contain water? Or something in the spectral lines that might look like water?

          It certainly doesn't look like what I'd expect a planet to look like in a photo (not that I'm an astronomer or anything). It's awfully

          • Re:Awesome! (Score:2, Informative)

            by Shigeru ( 598706 )
            As you get to the very lowest masses of the low-mass stars (about .08 solar masses, or 80 Jupiters), I think you do start getting water lines. The issue is that most stellar photospheres (like our sun's, say) are so hot you can't have molecules of any kind, whereas in cooler stars or brown dwarfs you can. Most people are at least vaguely familiar with the idea of atmoic spectra, where you get some number of sharp (more or less) lines throughout the visible, which, in theory, could be mistaken for one anot
            • What an excellent answer (answers, actually). Thank you. Always pleasant to have somebody who actually knows something about something around here.

    • Re:Awesome! (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Fantastic and cool. The only question I have is...where the hell is it? no where in the article could I find where to point a telescope to see it. I hope, for scientific verification, other astronomers have access to that information somewhere.

      I am not an astronomer, but I don't know how visible a brown dwarf at 230 light-years, much less the possible planet, would be to most backyard telescopes. However, if you are a serious amatuer, with serious equipment, I'm there are star charts that list the locati
      • well i was a little vague...i know its not visible to the backyard telescope, but id like to know where in the sky it is, just so i could point to it and say "yeah, over there" -- the star chart info is great, but im an astronomy chart n00b. now if someone said "dead center in the pan of the big dipper" or "a few inches to the left of betelgeuse", thats enough for me. 8)

    • Re:Awesome! (Score:4, Interesting)

      by JQuick ( 411434 ) on Friday September 10, 2004 @08:49PM (#10218240)
      >What's a little disappointing is that this planet is orbiting a brown dwarf, which isn't really a star

      Arguing that it is not a type of star seems questionable. There is a grey area between giant planetary objects and tiny stellar objects. Brown dwarves share properties with both at various times in their evolution.

      A Brown dwarf masses between 1 and 8 percent of our suns mass (which is a yellow dwarf). This mass is too small for gravity to produce high enough temperature and pressure in the core to sustain the fusion of hydrogen nuclei into helium 4. However this does not mean that fusion cannot occur. It also does not mean that the surface temperature of the body, or the luminosity of the body are not star-like at some point.

      Gravitational contraction alone raises the temperature of the gas considerably. Though the surface temperature of a typical brown dwarf may be as low as 1000K, early in their career the heat generated by their gravitational collapse be be high enough to shine red for a short time. Larger brown dwarves may also have pressures and temperatures at the core sufficient for deuterium and tritium based fusion reactions. The resulting release of energy is futile as it is far too small to even temporarily balance or reverse the gravitationally induced contraction. They couldn't make a go of fusion on the professional circuit, but fusion is fusion. If star-hood is a nuclear club, their amateur standing should count .

      Yes, they are dim and cool. They can only continue to cool and eventually will radiate weakly in the radio spectrum, as Jupiter and other large gas plants do. However, at some points they may have pretty respectable surface temperatures (perhaps as high as 2500K). At the core they also may fuse some paltry amounts of deuterium and tritium.

      On technical grounds this should justify calling them stars, if only briefly. On aesthetic grounds I also think these objects should be cut a bit of slack. The universe is cold and empty enough. Stripping these pitiful gas balls of star-hood entirely seems a bit too harsh.

  • ESO press release (Score:4, Informative)

    by Sygiinu ( 226801 ) on Friday September 10, 2004 @12:49PM (#10213851)
    Here's a link [eso.org] to the ESO press release.
  • On a 1 Gigapixel [slashdot.org] camera?
  • European astronomers have taken what may be the first picture of an extra-solar planet. The possible planet orbits a brown dwarf star 230 light years away.

    The picture looks disturbingly like one often posted at Slashdot.

    Where exactly were the cameras aimed again?

  • Here's an ASCII approximation of the original phorograph:

    .*

  • Although it looks cool, I wouldn't trust a static frame as 'evidence' of a planet. Things like tracking it's path or spectroscopically analyzing body's emission would go further to prove things. Then again this may just be the pretty face on a whole boatload of research and I need to dig a little deeper.
    • We discussed this at astronomer's coffee this morning. They did take a very low spectral resolution spectrum of it and it is fairly consistent with colours from a cool planet, but a proper motion measurement (i.e. take a picture about 2 years from now and see if they both move across the sky together) will confirm it.

      Dr Fish

    • Re:trust a picture? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by CanSpice ( 300894 )
      If you read the ESO press release [eso.org] you'll see that in addition to imaging it they've also taken spectra of it. The H-band spectrum they shows is similar to other sub-stellar objects, and it also shows fairly strong water absorption bands. This means that it's has to be fairly light. Evolutionary models have been run that predict that this object is about 5 times the mass of Jupiter.

      Don't worry, most astronomers don't base their predictions on one image of something, they always follow it up with either mult

  • Unconfirmed (Score:4, Informative)

    by Theory of Everything ( 696787 ) on Friday September 10, 2004 @03:13PM (#10215343)
    This announcement was premature, at best. It is not responsible science.

    The planet is not yet confirmed as such. It could very easily be a background star. This has happenned before [sciencenews.org], and the scientists got an awful lot of egg on their faces. Another unconfirmed "planet" image can be seen here [space.com], this one around a white dwarf.

    The responsible thing to do is wait a few years to determine if the objects have common proper-motions--if they move through the sky together, they are probably physically linked, and one can determine that the companion object really is a planet. Without this confirmation, the simplest explanation is not that it is a planet.

    Many teams of astronomers have images of planet candidates like this one. The responsible astronomers are the ones you aren't hearing from yet--the ones waiting to verify they have planets.

    The press-release title should be "A dim spot imaged near a brown dwarf." Any further conclusions have no basis.
    • Indeed. If it's bright enough to be observed optically, shouldn't your first reaction be, "Wait--this must be a binary system with a dim companion"?

      The link to another page (er, something about using infrared, which supposedly is not a reflection from the star, but a blackbody radiation from the planet itself) has more credibility, but, still, they are using "infrared" there, using a tiny little (well, I don't know exactly how big it is, but since it's on Hubble, it can't be too big) telescope on Hubble: t
      • Indeed. If it's bright enough to be observed optically, shouldn't your first reaction be, "Wait--this must be a binary system with a dim companion"?

        Normally the difference in brightness, or "contrast" between a star and a planet is very large--the stars is brighter by about 100 million times in visible wavelengths, and 1 million in the infrared (for something like Jupiter). However, the star in this case is not as bright as most stars--it is a brown dwarf. Brown dwarves are much, much fainter than regul
    • You're confusing science and news announcements. For those of us outside the field (like, say, me) it's interesting to hear about now, instead of two years later. So what if the investigation is incomplete? You can also read about ongoing research and speculation on AIDS vaccines, neuroscience, quantum computing, etc. if you want. Nothing irresponsible about it.

      And it's not like the press release says this is certain:

      The definitive answer is now awaiting further observations.

      On several occasions dur
      • You're confusing science and news announcements. For those of us outside the field (like, say, me) it's interesting to hear about now, instead of two years later.

        True, but nobody ever hears the part two years later when they say "oops, turned out we were wrong." It doesn't make the news. You are left instead with a mis-informed public. Then, when someone really does image a planet, and confirms it, the reaction is only "didn't they already do that?"

        You are correct to point out they clarified it in the
        • I agree that overhyping by scientists or sloppy writing by journalists can leave the public mis-informed, but you're argument is very close to saying that accurate information should be suppressed from the masses, because they can't understand it.

          There are probably be people who read this and think "didn't they already do that" because they've misunderstood the other techniques used for discovering planets. You're never going to be able to guarantee that someone who only cares enough to scans headlines wi

    • Re:Unconfirmed (Score:2, Informative)

      by Shigeru ( 598706 )
      Actually, this is an interesting case in that if it is a false alarm, the most likely explanation is that it's a foreground brown dwarf. The ESO team seems to have a noisy spectrum and JHK photometry of the companion. The colors really do suggest an L-dwarf (as opposed to a background K star, say), and the methane feature in the spectrum does seem real, assuming those data were reduced correctly (Difficult under the best conditions, not made easier by a brighter object 0.7 arcseconds away).

      But you're a
  • I looked all over the linked webpage for the picture of the planet but all I could find was what looked like a picture of the power status light from one of the new lacie 1 TB external harddrives. Can someone point me to the right page please?
  • It seems, from this image [eso.org], linked from the ESO press release, that we've more than maybe seen the first planet out of our solar system with our own eyes.

    It looks like we've also confirmed that brown dwarfs are glowing, white stopsigns. Let's just hope that no one needs to build a space lane straight through our solar system with great-big bulldozer things.

    [/lame attempt at humor]

    ~UP
  • Why arnt there any reports of the nearby stars? I'm sure they have to have planets too.
  • I mistakenly read this news' title as "Extra Solar panel damaged" and thought "Damn, that ISS is falling apart fast those days!". No, I had no coffee yet.

  • Ummmm .... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by gstoddart ( 321705 )
    This was posted yesterday and nobody on slashdot has commented on this yet?

    My god. Before '95 we suspected other planets would have to exist. Now we've not only cataloged over 120 of them but might have grabbed an image of one -- and no geek has at least said anything?

    Hell, some of the really freaky planetary systems they've found are just amazing. Think of something bigger than Jupiter orbiting way closer than the Earth to Sol but doing it's 'annual' orbit in about 4 days.

    Starting to get an idea of t

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