Exoplanet Found In Old Hubble Image

Kristina at Science News writes "A new way to process images reveals an extrasolar planet that had been hiding in an 11-year-old Hubble picture. After ground-based telescopes found three planets orbiting the young star HR 8799, a team took that information and reprocessed some 11-year-old Hubble Space Telescope images. Voila. There was one of the three planets, captured by Hubble but not visible until new knowledge could see the picture in a fresh light. The technique could reveal hidden treasures in many archived telescope images." For reference, the first exoplanet to be (knowingly) directly imaged was 2M1207_b in late 2004.

Re:blinders

[wjh31]

We can only perceive a tiny slive of the EM spectrum, but we've built telescopes capable of maping the night sky from the radio of the CMB to the high energy gamma ray bursts, and everything in between

Re:This is an old astronomical technique

[mbone]

Of course, the really cool things about such prediscovery observations of a planet is that they will really help to nail down the orbit.

Re:What's the new method like?

[ogre7299]

You have the basics right. But it gets complicated because anything in the light path between the star light going into the telescope until it hits the detector is going to contribute to the point spread function, or point response function. Which is basically the diffraction pattern made by a point source on the focal plane. Hubble's PSF can be a bit more complex because of the corrective optics in each instrument.

You are right that we could do this 10 years ago, but we probably have a much better model for the point spread function now than we did then.

Re:What's the new method like?

[Anonymous Coward]

The algorithm - called LOCI - is indeed slightly more sophisticated ;-)
You can find more in the paper by Lafrenière et al. [uchicago.edu] ( 2007, ApJ 660, 770-780)

Re:I wonder ...

[jschen]

Probably lots. In all fields of science, major discoveries often do not get credited to the first person (or instrument, in this case) to observe something. The credit goes to the first person who both recognizes the significance of what they observed and shares with the world. Newton was not the first to observe objects falling down. He was the first to truly understand the scientific significance of that observation. Fleming was not the first to observe the antibacterial properties of Penicillum mold (which led to the development of penicillin). He wasn't even the first to document it. But he was the first to follow up on it in a major way.