First Direct Photo of Exoplanet Confirmed 189
An anonymous reader noted a report confirming the first ever exoplanet actually photographed from telescopes on earth. Every other exoplanet so far 'observed' has been done by measuring wobbles of stars pulled by planetary gravity. But this one is a photograph. And that's just plain cool.
Pluto (Score:4, Interesting)
There's an irony in that we can now see extrasolar planets but we still can't get a really decent the smallest (dwarf)planet in our solar system.
Re:As Wil Wheaton often says (Score:5, Interesting)
And I hate living in a pre-warp culture. Come on scientists. Invent a warp drive so instead of taking blurry images, we can send a camera to that distant planet and take a photo directly.
I don't know. Maybe this is why aliens have never contacted us? Maybe they are stuck inside their local solar system, same as we are, and the distance between stars is just too big a hurdle to jump. I once read a Science story about humans that hopped on a giant ship and accelerated to llghtspeed to visit a star with an earthlike planet. The humans inboard only aged two years, but 150 years passed-away back home..... whole countries rose and fell during that timespan. Totally impractical way to explore.
Why bother (Score:3, Interesting)
When I went to click on this link, I told myself "This better not just be another glowing dot". As usual, I was severely disappointed.
Also, 500 Light Years?
So even if we achieve FTL travel it's gonna be 40 lifetimes before we get there, not including the time to send any information back? This is where potential space travel funding is going?
Very sad.
Re:As Wil Wheaton often says (Score:3, Interesting)
What I find most fascinating about people who want to be able to travel to exotic new worlds and find new life forms: so frequently these people spend their entire life behind a computer screen when there are so many worlds to visit here on Earth.
Re:How big a telescope do we need to see cities? (Score:3, Interesting)
> The diameter you want is 614 million kilometers...
That's the aperature you need for the specified resolution but you don't necessarily need that much collecting area (though it could be achieved via gravitational lensing).
I suspect that the OP's original requirement (imaging cities) could be achieved with a few dozen kilometer-scale mirrors seperated by a few million kilometers.