Exoplanet Found In Old Hubble Image 54
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.
I wonder ... (Score:2, Insightful)
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Re:I wonder ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Probably millions. It's called 'precovery' - very often, once you discover something new, you'll find that it has already been photographed half a dozen times and been completely ignored. Consider the planet Neptune, discovered in 1846: it turns out that it had already been observed by Galileo, twice, in the course of his studies of Jupiter. He mistook it for a star, although he noted that it appeared to move very slightly relative to other stars.
Re:I wonder ... (Score:4, Informative)
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... how many other unknown things are hiding in those old images.
Hey, I found Waldo!
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blinders (Score:5, Interesting)
Given that we only perceive a tiny slice of the electromagnetic spectrum, and rely on baryonic matter to map things out, and we're just starting to get good instrumentation, is this any surprise?
I'm regularly frustrated by the subtle hubris of completeness that underlies so many scientific assertions. It's as though we continually forget that science is fundamentally provisional, and that we're just hominids who only recently got refrigeration.
The nice thing about new techniques like this is that it points out that we are always missing something.
It's like the basic flaw in Fermi's paradox: why is it so hard to believe that there's a perfectly reasonable explanation for where everyone is, and we just haven't thought of it yet because it isn't obvious to hominids? Ockham's razor suggests for most things that we just don't have the answers, so keep looking, but for Fate's sake look away from the savannah-brain you're using.
Re:blinders (Score:5, Insightful)
There is no "flaw" in Fermi's paradox, it's an observation of an inconsistency designed to make one think about what we are missing.
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I stand corrected, I meant the flaw in the way it's used.
Re:blinders (Score:5, Informative)
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My point is that we still interpret the data with minds shaped by our limited perspective... the telescopes may be better than last year's, but there you go assuming a kind of completeness.
The map is not the territory.
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You must be thinking of something other than Ockham's razor. In the spirit of what "Ockham's razor" is, it's generally been simplified to, "The simplest explanation that covers all the facts is usually the best.", and a bunch of other similar variations.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ockhams_razor [wikipedia.org]
Re:blinders (Score:4, Insightful)
One of the major problems with Ockham's razor is a tendency that we have to assume that we have all the facts when we apply it.
Otherwise, it's a great tool.
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Yes: that wonderful aphorism suggests to me that the simplest explanation is usually that we don't have all the facts that need covering, and even that the few facts that we do have are subtly or grossly misleading, in the end.
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I'm regularly frustrated by the subtle hubris of completeness that underlies so many scientific assertions.
I don't think science is to blame for that, but the oversimplified reporting of it. No serious scientist assumes completeness.
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What do you mean by 'serious'? I've met quite a few people who've published repeatedly before their peers, are well-respected experts or devoted lab rats, and show clear signs of bloody-minded reductionist or even religious dogmatism... at least in public. I rather think it has more to do with funding structures and a human weakness for religious thinking than journalism.
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I'm regularly frustrated by the subtle hubris of completeness that underlies so many scientific assertions. It's as though we continually forget that science is fundamentally provisional, and that we're just hominids who only recently got refrigeration.
See sushi science and hamburger science [titech.ac.jp]. First published in Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, the author expounds on his idea that Western scientists tend to be reductionists, trying to fit all the observations into simple theories, and Eastern scientists tend to just accept results for what they are, without as much generalization. It's not that one way or the other is necessarily better; they're complimentary methods of looking at something, and both viewpoints have their place.
Gemini planet imager (Score:5, Interesting)
Once we can do direct imaging, we can sample the planet spectra, and determine the atmosphere, composition, etc.
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Re:Gemini planet imager (Score:4, Interesting)
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There are things more important than the pretty bits of paper you Americans cling to.
I'd thought the past few months would have shown you this. Profit does not always mean money.
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from sig:
A picture is worth exactly 1024 words.
That may be, but even a simple picture generally costs several dozen more k than a plaintext description.
Content is related to topic. Sort of.
Its a predator planet! (Score:5, Funny)
Getting new info with old data (Score:1)
1- Gather data
2- Analyse data
3- ???
4- Profit!
5- New processing methods are found
6- Go to 2
What's the new method like? (Score:4, Interesting)
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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 fo
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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)
This is an old astronomical technique (Score:5, Interesting)
Whenever anything interesting is discovered, people go to old surveys, old plates (the Harvard Sky Patrol from the 1930's tend to be especially useful) and old catalogs to see if people have seen it before. This is routinely done for asteroids, for example.
This is how Galileo's observations of Neptune in 1612 [dioi.org] and images of the quasar 3C273 from the 1890's were found, for example.
Re:This is an old astronomical technique (Score:5, Informative)
Of course, the really cool things about such prediscovery observations of a planet is that they will really help to nail down the orbit.
Hmmm... (Score:4, Funny)
This is so ironic -- we just found Hubble in our old exoplanet image. You little humans have come so far. You should be proud, at least for the next 40 hours...
Sincerely,
The Hostile Aliens
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Picture (Score:1)
O
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Nice work, but this is kind of like cheating... (Score:2)
but not visible until new knowledge could see the picture in a fresh light.
This says it all. In fact, you could create a much simpler extraction technique consisting of a black box around the known item that meets this same standard. Can the new extraction technique do more than this? That, apparently, remains to be seen.
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That being said, the above was just to make sure you're aware that it will be hard work and that you should really investigate the opportunities before jumping into this.
My rec
CAn we keep it then? (Score:1)
Imaging algorithm texts? (Score:2)
Dopeyish question, but are there any comprehensive or seminal texts dealing with the field of imaging (image resolution improvement) algorithms? This does not have to be limited to astronomy or still graphics.
As a side note, I find it kind of frustrating that tools like photoshop/gimp exist, and yet there doesn't appear to be texts dedicated towards using them to help resolve images that would otherwise not be apparent.
This is the kind of thing SETI should be doing... (Score:2)