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.
As Wil Wheaton often says (Score:5, Insightful)
Damn, I love living in the future.
Re:As Wil Wheaton often says (Score:4, Funny)
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When? Just now!
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According to Dr Dan Streetmentioner's Time Traveller's Handbook of 1001 Tense Formations [wikia.com], this is the grammatically correct use of the present future tense.
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.
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Agreed. Something like Warp from Star Trek or the Gravity Drive from Event Horizon (minus the hellish torture...or not, some people might dig that) are likely the only ways we will be able to explore beyond our solar system in a reasonable amount of time.
Or, we could just all play the "space age" in Spore at the same time :p
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It's only impractical now while our world is developing.
Who knows how long people will live for in the future? If we could all live to say 500 years old, then space travel would be much easier on us.
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Or like in the Asimov novel Robots of Dawn, maybe long-lived humans will become so afraid of death & disease that they will stop exploring completely. In that Science story the humans are born, live, and die in their homes.
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Yeah, doesn't sound very different from some people today who would abandon our entire manned space program because it's too dangerous.
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Relativity to the Rescue (Score:2)
even if we all live 1000 years, getting to that planet will be incredibly long and boring.
Not necessarily if you are the one doing the travelling. In that case the trip can be arbitrarily short.
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Much easier on us? You want to do a 440-year round-trip across the galaxy when you're 60+? Good luck with that.
Re:As Wil Wheaton often says (Score:5, Funny)
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In particle physics there are experiments which seem to prove faster-than-light communication is possible. So it might take 150 years to reach a star, but the camera could beam back the video instantly.
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Ummmm.... no there aren't. No experiment has ever shown that information can be transmitted faster than light or even hinted at it. you might be thinking of quantum entanglement. This commonly gets translated as "faster than light communication", but this is not accurate.
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In particle physics there are experiments which seem to prove faster-than-light communication is possible.
No there aren't.
There are experiments which seem to demonstrate that things can appear to happen faster than light if and only if no information whatsoever is transmitted.
The correlation between the collapsed states of entangled particles is such a case. You can interpret the result as meaning that one particle somehow told the other about its' post-collapse state "instantly", but this can't tell you a
well only sort of... (Score:2)
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In particle physics there are experiments which seem to prove faster-than-light communication is possible.
No there are not. There is no experimental evidence whatsoever that FTL communication is possible.
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You might want to check out some of the advantages of using thiotimoline [wikipedia.org] as a fuel.
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In an infinite university, all courses are possible?
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The best feature about the IID is that is only has to be a little bit possible in order to be inevitable.
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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.
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I've noticed this as well.
The people that seem most interested in the possibility of communicating with extraterrestrial life also seem the least interested in the possibility of communicating with people right here.
And I mean, really, if you are considering travel to see exotic new worlds and cultures - there really are a lot of options right here, on Earth.
Most of the people I know that are most excited about talk of space travel and who claim they'd be willing to take a one-way ticket to Mars; haven't ma
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Octopus.
Octopus are intelligent; they figure that they have the rough brain capacity of a four-year-old. They are alien; they live underwater, they are cephalopods, and they do not use audio communication. They are novel; I dive, and all the divers I know love to find octos.
They are closer to us than any alien could possibly be, but we can't communicate with them at all. I find it unlikely at best that we could have any communication whatsoever with a species from another solar system.
Most people on this
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if you are considering travel to see exotic new worlds and cultures - there really are a lot of options right here, on Earth.
While that's true to some extent (they are not exotic new worlds they are exotic parts of our world) these exotic 'worlds' have already been visited by people from our own cultures repeatedly and all you have to do is go to the web and read up on what to expect. That does not mean that it is not fun to visit (I love travelling) but going to a truly new and exotic world would be very different since, if you are one of the first to go, you will not have a good idea of what to expect hence it will be far more
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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.
I have never heard of such a thing. Do you have a link?
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whole countries rose and fell during that timespan
Well that's your problem there. A primitive planet that is divided into "countries" that are pitted against each others and so "rise and fall" in relation to one another. That's a lot of wasted effort and pathetically parochial in the context of inter-planetary exploration.
Should we ever get beyond this maybe 150 years wouldn't matter so much.
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Totally impractical way to explore
That is because people's expectations are based on Star Trek, which was basically "Wagon Train to the Stars". Writers invented Warp engines so that the plot could follow a familiar theme ( "Space Boat" ) that was easy for the audience to relate to.
If we want to explore the stars, then we need to change our expectations and get ready for some seriously long voyages.
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I don't know. Maybe this is why aliens have never contacted us?
Actually, they have contacted us. Unfortunately, they landed in Arizona and were immediately deported.
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Photo dates from 2008 (Score:5, Insightful)
The key word in the title is "confirmed." Readers may remember that there were 2 separate sets of planets photographed in papers published in 2008. Now, we are sure (not that there was much doubt) that one of them is truly orbiting its primary star.
Re:Photo dates from 2008 (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, if you want to get technically correct - the best kind of correct - then the title should be "First Confirmation of Direct Photo of Alien Planet", not "First Direct Photo of Alien Planet Finally Confirmed", since it most certainly is not the first direct photograph of an alien planet.
We photographed many, many alien planets before this one: every time anyone pointed a camera at the sky, in fact. We've just not spotted any planets in those other images (yet).
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We just need to use the good old CSI zoom and enhance! We'll find many more!
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But they use a super-edition of WinZip (apparently, if you actually pay for it, it becomes about a million times better at compressing things - but only the US government bothered to find out).
So the billion megapixels take up, roughly, the same size as a crappy cell phone pic.
It's amazing.
Re:Photo dates from 2008 (Score:4, Funny)
We just need to use the good old CSI zoom and enhance! We'll find many more!
But won't they all be covered in semen and blood stains?
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We photographed many, many alien planets before this one: every time anyone pointed a camera at the sky, in fact. We've just not spotted any planets in those other images (yet).
Maybe (in a handful of all of the millions of images taken of astronomical objects), but I would doubt it. Exo-Planetary imagery is tough and is generally done of new systems in the IR (young planets are hot, and thus glow brighter). If by "photographed" you mean "an image with at least one pixel that could be recognized as an exo-pl
Good (Score:2)
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Pluto will always be a planet in my heart.
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Can I like P.O.O.P. on Facebook?
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Wow... (Score:2)
This makes me happy in a way I find very difficult to describe.
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I know exactly what you mean. Heavenly bodies get me excited, too!
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Re:Adaptic optics FTW (Score:5, Informative)
I see this as a big triumph of adaptic optics. This picture was not made by a space telescope, but by an earth-based one!
Indeed, hope the liquid mirror option becomes practical and viable [slashdot.org] so we can achieve more amazing photographs and data like this. Although I have to wonder why they didn't use an orbiting satellite like Hubble to avoid Earth's atmosphere when photographing such an amazing thing. Have terrestrial adaptive optic solutions already caught up with orbiting satellites?
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IIRC, Hubble's mirror, despite not having to deal with atmospheric conditions, is much smaller than that of many terrestrial observatories. As such if you can apply adaptive optics techniques, you still have more usable light on the ground based telescopes.
I personally just say we take the best of both worlds - I want a lunar based observatory with a 25 meter aperture. No need for adaptive optics, and FAR more light gathering capability than our current telescopes. We'll figure out how to pay for it late
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I personally just say we take the best of both worlds - I want a lunar based observatory with a 25 meter aperture. No need for adaptive optics, and FAR more light gathering capability than our current telescopes. We'll figure out how to pay for it later :)
Use a design like the Hobbey-Eberly [wikipedia.org] or Keck [wikipedia.org] scopes, constructing a very large mirror out of many smaller hexagonal pieces. Launch the hexes and components of the support structure individually into earth orbit, dock and refuel the rockets at the convenie
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Besides, isn't it going to be ultimately more beneficial to be able to image "small" fields, such as individual solar systems or planets? Not that we have to choose, we've got both ground-based and orbiting telescopes, and that's a good thing.
And it's such a bright little planet (Score:2)
Just a bit blurry (Score:2)
Mulder and Scully in agreement (Score:2)
Finally, an extraterrestrial revelation Mulder and Scully can agree on.
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.
Inner planets (Score:2)
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We'll the problem becomes that that planet which could possibly be just a brown dwarf which I've seen estimates have to be 8-10 the mass of Jupiter. It's 300 AU from it's parent star which means that star must be massive or we have a picture of a brown dwarf. What I'd like to see is it's orbit, and if it's orbiting based on their masses would it be possible for planet formations in the middle or is there a debris field between them because their gravity wells prevent what's left to condense into planets.
W
Other Direct Images of Exoplanets Exist (Score:4, Informative)
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At some pivotal point in the near future we will have more pictures of planets outside our solar system than within it!
I doubt it. There are an awful lot of people taking pictures of (portions) of the Earth.
Or did you mean pictures of more planets outside our solar system than within?
Who writes this stuff? (Score:3, Informative)
> first ever alien planet actually photographed...
Well, technically this is not the first alien planet photographed. That honor would probably go to Venus. However, this is the first exoplanet ever photographed, but it's old news since the first photographs of Fomalhaut's planet were taken in 2008...
Slow news day or something???
How big a telescope do we need to see cities? (Score:3, Insightful)
I've been wondering for twenty years at least: how big a telescope do we need to build, in space, or on the dark side of the moon, or even on earth, to see cities on an earthlike planet somewhere out there?
And why are we not building one instead of wasting all the money on welfare, manned space exploration of a our mostly dead solar system, and more missiles so we can blow this place earth up even more times than we already can (I think we destroy the earth up to 6 times now?)
The main problem with our space program is that for 100 years we've been stuck with the rocket equation and 2% at best payloads. Ion engines give a little more hope for an interstellar probe someday...
If we found some more living earths out there, maybe our best and brightest might expend their brainpower on coming up with a better engine for space travel, rather than investment banking and law.
So how big a telescope do we need? Let's start building it!
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I think just to be able to see footprints on the moon left by the astronauts you would need a lens about 1800 feet in diameter. I'm sure someone smarter than me can give a better answer, but the gist is that you would need one huge fucking telescope to see cities on a planet outside of our solar system. Bigger than we could probably ever build.
Maybe an array of large telescopes, but I think you're still asking a lot.
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Now THAT is interesting!!!
I wonder if a smaller telescope could detect say, sodium or mercury vapor lamp spectral emissions on the dark side of a planet...
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I have always wondered this myself, but I guesstimate that it would require a lens the size of the Earth. Or the Sun. Or something impossible like that.
The problem is that you can't get details from long exposures. These far-off objects require exposures that are hours long [physicsworld.com]. Imagine taking a 5-hour long exposure of a soccer game: all the players would be blurred. Now imagine that the players are running at the speed of a planet: upwards of 65,000 miles per hour [wolframalpha.com]. That is going to be one heck of a blurr
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sin(theta) = 1.22 (wavelength / diameter of lens aperture)
Moving things around we get:
1.22 * wavelength / sin(theta) = diameter
1.22 * wavelength / sin(tan^-1(resolution length / distance to object))
With a wavelength of 500 nanometers (visible light), a resolution of a kilometer (might be enough to see that there's something interesting there), at a distance of 20 light years (the nearest known extrasolar planet is 10.4 light years, so let's be generous and
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Oh wow. Thanks to all of you for all of the calculations. I see the problem now.
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ATLAST is interesting, it will detect "signatures" of life. That's not what I'm talking about, I'm thinking something that could look at a planet 100 light years away and photograph "people" (!) walking around on the streets? Can somebody calculate how big it would have to be? Say it's 500 meters... well then let's just build a 500 meter scope of some sort and put it on the moon, or wherever. It would be the greatest technological challenge of all time maybe, but with the greatest rewards of knowledge o
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OK - Here's the math ...
100 light-years = 1 quadrillion kilometers -- You want a 1 meter resolution at that distance, so you need an angular resolution alpha, where tan(alpha) = 1 / 10^18 --> alpha = 5.7 x 10^-17 degrees
Let's use Hubble as a scaling proxy. It has a 2.5 meter mirror and 1/20th of an arc second resolution. Converting units, that resolution is 1 / (20*60*60) = 1.4 x 10^-5 degrees. Now, simply scale to get the desired resolution and you have the diameter of the mirror = 2.5 * 1.4 x 10^-5 / 5
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> 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.
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I'm no expert but I think you'd basically need one bigger than earth. They are working on a way to use several smaller telescopes that are somehow linked to each other so that they act as one big telescope but this won't be online for a while yet (2015 or so IIRC). I feel you frustration but they are trying!
(note: all 'facts' in this comment come from a New Scientist article I read about 6 months ago)
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.
MOD PARENT UP (Score:2)
Agreed. And when I clicked on the link, I expected to see a *planet*. What I got was ...
A planet outside of our solar system, said to be the first ever directly photographed by telescopes on Earth, has been officially confirmed to be orbiting a sun-like star, according to follow-up observations.
The alien planet is eight times the mass of Jupiter and orbits at an unusually great distance from its host star -- more than 300 times farther from the star than our Earth is from the sun. ... The planet has an estimated temperature of over 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit
Um, we already have a name for a massive sun-like star ... it's called a star. The fact that orbits another star doesn't make it somehow a planet. Am I missing something here?
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Yes you are. It isn't a star because 8 times the mass of jupiter is not sufficient for sustainable fusion. It isn't even really in the size range for unsustainable fusion believed to occure during the formation of brown dwarves in the 13-80 jupiter range.
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What are you talking about? The planet, which is 8 Jupiter masses and nothing like a star, is orbiting a sun-like star.
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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.
Sorry, but expect to be disappointed for a very, very long time.
This is where potential space travel funding is going?
No? It's where telescope funding is going.
Very sad.
Yeah, it's very sad to learn more about the universe, to be able to study other solar systems besides our own, to discover what kinds there are and how they form.
That's sad... in opposite world. Or lack-of-i
Orbital period (Score:2)
"This difference, however, will be "very small," said the study's co-author Marten van Kerkwijk of the University of Toronto, since the fastest possible orbital period is more than one thousand years.
If the period of rotation for two bodies is T = 2 * pi * (((length of semi-major axis)^3)/(G * (M1+M2))), then the time works out to be 5615 years and change [wolframalpha.com]. Anyone know why they're low balling the estimate so much?
To Arms!! (Score:2)
Whether they ever find life there or not, I think 1RXS 1609 should be considered an enemy planet.
This submission is inaccurate (Score:3, Informative)
In 2005, a planet was directly imaged orbiting a brown dwarf. That's not a sun-like star, but it was the first direct image of an exoplanet.
In 2008, it was announced that Hubble spotted a planet orbiting Fomalhaut. That's a star hotter and more massive than the Sun, but still sun-like. The images were taken in 2004 and 2006 and it took a while to make sure they were right.
However, those were taken from space. Also in 2008 images were taken of planets orbiting the sun-like star HR8799 using the ground-based Gemini telescope in Hawaii.
With me so far? The news today is from observations also taken in 2008, also taken by the Gemini 'scope (and a few months before the ones I just mentioned of HR8799). At the time, the planet was not confirmed. New observations indicate it is, in fact, a planet.
So to be completely accurate: the image from 2008 of a now-confirmed planet was the first direct image of a planet orbiting a sun-like star taken using a ground-based telescope. This is still very cool, but has been reported inaccurately (the space.com headline, for example, is wrong or at best incomplete).
Also, going back to the submitted text here to slashdot, planets have been found by three methods: the gravitation tug-of-war Doppler method, the transit method, and by gravitational lensing. I'll leave it up to you to look all that up; I'm exhausted. :)
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Have they plotted the orbit? (Score:2)
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Alien, in this context, = outside of our solar system. As in too far for you to take a picture.
Re:Because we can't see Venus at night.... (Score:5, Funny)
Alien, in this context, = outside of our solar system. As in too far for you to take a picture.
You are making quite an assumption about where the GP poster lives and is posting from. Beam me up dismiley!
Re:Because we can't see Venus at night.... (Score:4, Informative)
Is there some weird definition of "Alien" that I dont know of?
Usually it means extra-terrestrial, but in this case they mean extra-solar (a word also used in the article). I'll assume the guy who came up with the headline is not the guy who wrote the article.
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If there were actual aliens on Venus, we'd have found them by now.
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Probably not. We have done little more than radar map the surface of Venus. We can't get an image from orbit and our probes can only last minutes at most in the heat, pressure and acidity. Don't get me wrong, I don't think that we would find life there if we had a better way of looking, but Venus isn't an easy place to explore.
Mars on the other hand is fairly easy to explore. We have not observed any current life, but there at least some fairly good indications that life once existed there.
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Is there some weird definition of "Alien" that I dont know of?
"That you can't even dream of visiting physically one day"
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Is there some weird definition of "Alien" that I dont know of?
"Alien" can mean different things in different contexts. I've used this disparity in more than one journal. [slashdot.org]
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From TFA "first ever directly photographed by telescopes on Earth" Formalhaut_b was imaged from Hubble.
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