Lowest Mass Exoplanet Ever Directly Imaged. Probably. 43
The Bad Astronomer writes "Astronomers announced today that they have taken a direct image of the lowest mass exoplanet ever seen. HD 95086 b has a mass about 4 to 5 times that of Jupiter, and orbits a star 300 light years away that is slightly more massive and hotter than the Sun. The planet is not 100% confirmed, but it appears very likely to be real. If so, it's a hot gas giant, still cooling from its formation less than 20 million years ago. The picture, taken in the infrared, clearly shows the planet, making it one of fewer than a dozen such planets seen in actual telescopic images."
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It’s massive, so it’s almost certainly a gas giant like Jupiter, and it’s hot, probably about 730 C (1350 F) at the tops of its clouds.
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Re:Probably pretty cold (Score:4, Informative)
No need to be sad. Increasing effective aperture size of the telescope increases its resolving power. The imaging element doesn't have to be a single mirror or lens, but can consist of an array of elements scattered over a large area. Tricky part is getting all of the elements in phase agreement. Also doesn't have to be visible light. We are already 'imaging' surfaces of planets with synthetic aperture radar, operating on the same principle.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very_Large_Telescope [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very_Large_Array [wikipedia.org]
So imagine a much larger optical array network, many miles in diameter, for imaging the surfaces of these exoplanets.
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Being stuck in the outskirts of the unfashionable arm of the milky way does reduce our chances of being wiped out by gamma ray bursts, black holes etc though. You wouldn't want to live near most of the "interesting" parts of the galaxy.
Sublight self-replicating probes could explore the galaxy for us (eventually), although without FTL comms it would largely be a one-way message to any other intelligent races out there.
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I guess humans will be the voyeurs of the universe. Our telescopes will get better so we can watch those sexy aliens taking sonic showers or something.
No wonder everyone is avoiding our little space neighborhood. :)
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Given that it orbits a star that's 300 light years away, it's probably still pretty cold! That's one huge orbit.
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Well. Someone has to do it, I'll do it: to point out to you that the 300 light years are not the planetary orbit's radius, but the distance between Earth and that other planetary system. Tsheesh.
Indeed. Plus the article clearly states that as well. Talking about poor reading comprehension, hahaha :)
Why a hot gas planet? (Score:2)
A lot of these hot supermassive gas giants seem to be extremely young. I wonder what that says about planetary development. Do they lose mass after a billion or two years?
Re:Why a hot gas planet? (Score:5, Informative)
I'm not an expert, so ignore me if one shows up; but my suspicion would be that they cool down enough that we can't see them anymore: You'd get a lot of heat, initially, when the planet coalesces; but if it isn't massive enough to ignite fusion and become a star, it'll just keep bleeding radiation into space until it reaches whatever equilibrium temperature the intensity and location of its local star provide for. As they get colder, their output gets weaker, until it gets to the point where our instruments are insufficiently sensitive to distinguish it from the background(unless it passes in front of its star, which has allowed us to indirectly infer the existence of smaller objects that we can't see directly).
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Is Kepler still working?
No, he died back in 1630
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He's dead? I didn't even know he was sick!
(sorry, couldn't resist)
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It's very likely in a planetary system for large bodies to collide. Now, to aid in the planet formation process, those large chunks stick (mostly) together; but, with so many bodies orbiting the star, there will inevitably be some planet-sized bodies that either get decimated by these impacts, lose large masses (see: Earth's Moon) from these impacts, or have their orbits altered and begin a spiral of either death towards their star or loneliness out of their solar system.
Another fair question is how many mo
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A lot of these hot supermassive gas giants seem to be extremely young. I wonder what that says about planetary development. Do they lose mass after a billion or two years?
It is suspect that stars lose planets during their evolution - either they collide or plunge into their fiery fathers, or get slingshot to hell. Even our own solar system is suspect (or rather is known by inference) to have had more planets and planetoids that what it had in the past.
So what this could mean is that the more readily observable neighborhood with our current technology is composed of younger suns with younger, hotter gas giants. Observable =/= Existing. More precisely Existing > Observabl
Yo mamma so fat (Score:5, Funny)
She can be directly imaged from 300 light years away.
Re:Yo mamma so fat (Score:5, Funny)
_Yo_ mamma so fat, she can only be seen by her Hawking radiation.
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_Yo_ mamma so fat, she can only be seen by her Hawking radiation.
Well, be that as it may, at least she's trying to lose mass.
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Lowest mass? (Score:1)
Re:Lowest mass? (Score:4, Informative)
Directly observed - this planet has been imaged. Most of the confirmed planets from the Kepler mission are inferred from the dip in luminosity the parent star exhibits when the planet transitions across it, as viewed from Earth, or we can infer that there are planets/binary partner if a star "wobbles". Direct images of exo-planets are rare, even this one a mere 300 LY away is still only a tiny blip on the screen.
Isn't science wonderful? (Score:4, Insightful)
Twenty years ago, I though that there were relatively few exoplanets - only perhaps one in every few hundred systems having them - and even if there were one nearby, the chances of detecting it, ever, were small. Now we are knee deep in exoplanets, we know that large numbers of stars can have them, and we can even see them (probably). What I thought would never happen is fast transitioning from surprising to mundane.
Which just goes to prove the to Clarke's law, that almost nothing is impossible, in due course. Once we couldn't see them. Now we can see them, but fear we will never visit them. But history shows that visiting will come, in time - provided we have enough time.
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What could possibly go wrong?
The way things are going... (Score:3)
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Lowest Mass Exoplanet Imaged. Probably. (Score:1)
But we may have deep-fried it, or possibly jerry-rigged it. We're just not certain at this stage. But imaging is definitely a possibility.
I Like the Probably bit (Score:2)
Truth in a headline. :-) I sped read the article, and it looks that they were alluding to the fact that it hasn't been confirmed as a planet. But after reading "How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming", would speculate that you could also say that images have been taken that are still being analyzed, or that both computer and human observations have glossed over that show planets.
Missing from headline (Score:2)
Lowest mass exoplanet directly seen from the Earth
We don't know what aliens have seen orbiting other stars...