Revolutionary New View of Baby Planets Forming Around a Star 91
astroengine writes Welcome to HL Tauri — a star system that is just being born and the target of one of the most mind-blowing astronomical observations ever made. Observed by the powerful Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile, this is the most detailed view of the proto-planetary disk surrounding a young star 450 light-years away. And those concentric rings cutting through the glowing gas and dust? Those, my friends, are tracks etched out by planets being spawned inside the disk. In short, this is the mother of all embryonic star system ultrasounds. But this dazzling new observation is so much more — it's a portal into our solar system's past, showing us what our system of planets around a young sun may have looked like over 4 billion years ago. And this is awesome, because it proves that our theoretical understanding about the evolution of planetary systems is correct. However, there are some surprises. "When we first saw this image we were astounded at the spectacular level of detail," said Catherine Vlahakis, ALMA Deputy Program Scientist. "HL Tauri is no more than a million years old, yet already its disc appears to be full of forming planets. This one image alone will revolutionize theories of planet formation."
I'm gona ask the hard questions here... (Score:2, Interesting)
I've always wondered who does the "Artist's impression of" things for NASA and various other agencies. Do they just employ some CG artists full time and they're basically on-call to whip something up so they can actually publish one of these articles? How accurate are they or are just going for visual impact instead of real fidelity?
Re:I'm gona ask the hard questions here... (Score:5, Informative)
I've always wondered who does the "Artist's impression of" things for NASA and various other agencies. Do they just employ some CG artists full time and they're basically on-call to whip something up so they can actually publish one of these articles? How accurate are they or are just going for visual impact instead of real fidelity?
That's a great question. And might even be useful if it applied in this case.
The Atacam Large Milimeter/submilimeter Array [almaobservatory.org] (ALMA) is the source for the photos [almaobservatory.org] of the HL Tauri system, some 450 light years away.
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At the bottom of the article is "Artist's impression of the HL Tauri protoplanetary disk." This is in addition to the image from the actual ALMA observatory.
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At the bottom of the article is "Artist's impression of the HL Tauri protoplanetary disk." This is in addition to the image from the actual ALMA observatory.
As soon as I saw the article was from discovery.com, I gleaned enough information from the article to find the actual source and went there. I never saw the referenced "artist's impression." My apologies.
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Even my limited image-editing skills could knock this together in a matter of minutes.
To go back to your original question, I wouldn't be surprised if NASA's press offices have enough work passing through that they do have either a number of full-time graphics artists who work on this sort of thing (for different offices), or
Re:I'm gona ask the hard questions here... (Score:4, Interesting)
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Calling Blinn a first rate computer animator is a bit of an understatement,
The dude invented half of the algorithms CG uses today.
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The dude invented half of the algorithms CG uses today.
Well, that's again perhaps a bit of an overstatement, but Blinn is definitely the James Watt of CGI, or a close equivalent to something like that.
Blinn interview (Score:2, Insightful)
I bet I'm not the only one who'd be chuffed if Jim Blinn did a Slashdot interview.
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I suppose it's this "L.Calçada" guy on the bottom of the image.
It's probably this Luis Calçada: http://luiscalcada.scienceoffi... [scienceoffice.org]
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NASA does have an internal group for making concept art, called the Advanced Concepts Lab. I interned at NASA last summer and worked on a project that was having some art made by them. We met with them about once a week to share details from the technical side of our project with them (e.g. how the aerobraking and entry sequence would go), and also got some advice from them to make our demonstration models look good.
In aerospace, there doesn't need to be a sacrifice of fidelity to get visual impact, becau
Why Link To Crap Sites? (Score:5, Informative)
When you can go to the source [almaobservatory.org]?
Crap? (Score:2)
Bull !
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Ring Spacing Reason? (Score:5, Interesting)
What is most interesting is the nearly equal radial spacing of the half dozen most distinct rings.
That begs the question, why?
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That begs the question
No it doesn't, it raises [begthequestion.info] the question.
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I'm guessing here, but probably because the matter comprising the disc is homogenous. Since all planets start forming at roughly the same time, if the material were all approximately the same throughout, then the areas of local maximum gravity that are collecting the particles will be equidistant.
What happens next will be interesting, because with this assumption, there's more material as you get farther form the disc. That means the farther you go out, the larger the planets will become (you can sorta see
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For certain values of "next" and "happens". As a geologist, I'm perfectly comfortable with the idea that it takes in the order of 50 million years to turn a collapsing gas cloud into a star and a suite of planets. But if you translate that into events that we could observe at this range (e.g. analogues of the giant impacts suspected responsible for the Earth-Moon and Pluto-Charon systems and the axial tilts of Uranus and Venus), you're still looking at one ten-millionth
This image cost a billion dollars (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm privileged to get to work on a prototype antenna for this project, which was just installed on Kitt Peak and commissioned today.
Re:This image cost a billion dollars (Score:5, Interesting)
Either way, this array was definitely money well spent.
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That image, at an "I haven't done any research on this case but I know about this stuff" guess, spans perhaps 50AU and looks like it's maybe 256 pixels across.
On which scale Earth is a disk slightly under half of one thousandth of a single pixel in size. So, not happening.
There have been propositions to build telescopes capable of taking direct images. At the time, the "this is our fantasy at the edge of technical plausibility" proposition was LISA: A constellation of telescopes in L4/L5, using laser links
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Re:This image cost a billion dollars (Score:5, Informative)
Although the star is much smaller than the Sun, the disc around HL Tauri stretches out to almost three times as far from the star as Neptune is from the Sun.
That's the caption on an approximate side-by-side comparison image. Neptune is 30.1 AU, so, 80 AU or so? In the image, the disk looks closer to two times the size, but I'm going with the words.
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Actually, the near-circularity of the cleared areas suggests that there aren't any close interactions in the near future or recent (millions of orbits) past.
Re:This image cost a billion dollars (Score:5, Insightful)
And yet, if you think on it from a "space colonization strategy game" perspective, we're investing just 1:100000 of our gross world product on the new technology that might let us find the location of our first extra solar colony.
Or, in other words, I defend it's arguably one of the very few things on which it's worth spending money (from an inhumanly objective point of view).
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colonies are viable, just not cost effective (Score:3)
You're right that we're not going to be making interstellar colonies anytime soon - the only realistic option with known physics is a generation ship, and we're nowhere near experienced enough with self-contained ecosystems to build something with a decent chance of surviving the centuries or millenia an interstellar voyage would take.
Keeping people alive on the moon though? That we've got pretty well licked, so long as occasional supply runs are included in your plans. Biosphere 2 had issues, but still l
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What problems exist on Earth that aren't rooted in economics? Globally we produce ~4x as much food as is consumed, and have cures available for most diseases. The problem is simply that much of the world has nothing of sufficient value to exchange for them.
There are very good reasons for not yet colonizing space, but they're all rooted in "what's in it for me?". I give Musk's Mars colony the best chance of current proposals simply because it's got a billionaire with a dream behind it.
Also, artificially l
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Good job ignoring all the parts that countered your main point and focusing on the bit about future technology. Go back and read the tl;dr section and tell me, what technology is missing there? No, part numbers and schedules are not technology, and note the "earth-dependent" prefix on colony. I'll grant you one thing: a heavy lift vehicle that would make the whole thing much easier. But we had one in the past and with Falcon Heavy and/or SLS, we'll have one in a few years. It'll take longer than that t
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They certainly are if you want them to, you know, ACTUALLY EXIST. Just saying things isn't enough, making glib oversimplifications and appeals to emotion either, you have to actually BUILD IT.
Apple can't build an iPhone with a 5.05 inch screen. Haha! You Apple Nutters think they can do anything. If you think they can do it, where's the part number for the screen? Where's the schedule? Sorry, nobody in the world makes 5.05 inch screens, the technology just isn't there.
Am I doing it right?
You have *NOTHING*.
Ah ha! I know you! You're the software patent examiner that rubber stamps everything that's In The Cloud(TM) or On A Smartphone(TM). We have inflatable habitats in space, but inflatable habitats On The Mo
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"There's obviously nothing beyond the forest."
The shortness of sight of your kind of people has lost every single fucking time during the entire history of mankind.
And yet, more short sighted people are born to fill every generation.
It's ok. Don't worry. While you insist there's nothing there, other people will find it for you. As every other fucking time since we lived in caves.
Is this the new science-speak? (Score:1)
...mind blowing, powerful, my friends, mother-of-all, dazzling, awesome, astounded, revolutionize...
Or is it more like something in your spam folder?
That is an amazing telescope but unfortunately to my eyes the pictures are not informative. Perhaps tomorrow some details will be highlighted to show ordinary folks what the excitement is about.
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I guess it's a good thing you're not an astronomer or a cosmologist. One of the things that we've already learned from such images is that our current model of how solar systems form needs tweaking (according to our models, this star isn't old enough to have protoplanets or vote, although it can serve in the military).
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" One of the things that we've already learned from such images"
TFA suggests that this is a unique image from a new telescope. Are you saying that there are others? Who is this 'we' you are referring to? You say 'according to our models'- are you saying that you are one of the scientists involved? You seem to be suggesting that I should have been able to understand all this from looking at the picture, and yet you have not said how this new image will inform myself and other slashdot readers of anything.
Hav
Put down the keyboard and back away slowly. (Score:2)
Mindless troll.
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We've been seeing things like protoplanetary discs since the late 1980s (Beta Pictoris, IIRC, I haven't checked it). A decade later we were seeing the protoplanetary discs distinctly from their stars. Now we're seeing multiple gaps within the discs, which allows us to do (or infer) certain Keplerian relationships about those systems.
New instruments lead to higher resolution both by direct observation and by interferometric combination of new and
Re:Is this the new science-speak? (Score:5, Funny)
...mind blowing, powerful, my friends, mother-of-all, dazzling, awesome, astounded, revolutionize...
Or is it more like something in your spam folder?
Scientists used this one weird trick to find exoplanets... And you won't BELIEVE what happened next!
Terminology (Score:2)
I really wish news articles would get their terminology right.
No.
The correct term is planetary system.
But hey, at least they didn't do what so many other publications do and incorrectly refer to exoplanetary systems as "other solar systems" as though "Solar" is a generic term and not, in actuality, a proper noun referring to our sun, Sol.
Okay I'll stop being pedantic now.
But serio
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It's not "a" Solar System, it's the Solar System. There is only one.
Solar is a proper noun, not a generic term. But it is commonly misused that way.
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The Solar System is a planetary system named after its star, Sol.
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That response is kind of a non sequitur. You're correct that "the Sun" is correct, but I'm also correct that "the Solar System" is a planetary system named after our star, Sol.
Sadly (Score:2)
Sadly, one of them will probably be like Pluto.
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Sadly, one of them will probably be like Pluto.
A dog?
I'm being repressed (Score:2)
It's not realistic to expect it to throw a sodding gas giant out.
Leaving aside the fact that the executive officer for the week that stupid rule was invented is an asshat & it was never ratified by a 2/3 majority of the villagers.
We finally know! (Score:2)
We finally know how is babby formed!
Reality check on resolution (Score:2)
From the wikipedia page about the Chile telescope, resolution is about 10^-7 radians. From the article, distance is about 450 light-years. From the wikipedia article about light-years, one light-year is about 10^-13 kilometr
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A different way of looking at it: if our rapidly advancing information technology is giving us ground-based images this good, imagine what we can do above Earth's wavery atmosphere.
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One number that's woefully missing from the news stories is the wavelength (frequency) at which the observation was made. NRAO has made two sets of receivers, at 3 mm and 1.3 mm wavelengths,
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They access about (1/100)^3 volume of space, and therefore to about 1/1000000 (one millionth) of the number of protoplanetary discs to examine.
The closest protoplanetary disc I can think of is around Beta Pictoris, at 63 light years. So in the 10 l.y. range, I'd expect there to be (1/6)^3 other protoplanetary discs - less than one two-hundredth more systems.
There's a reason for looking at objects hundreds of light years away - there aren't any (or man
Revolutionary, or confirmatory? (Score:3)
"...proves that our theoretical understanding about the evolution of planetary systems is correct."
"...will revolutionize theories of planet formation."
Well, which is it? Is it proving that we're right, or proving that we've been wrong?
I expect the answer is that it confirms general aspects of the theory, but challenges specific details. As written, though, the summary seems to contradict the quote.