Exoplanet Camera Now Online 47
The Bad Astronomer writes with news that the Gemini Planet Imager is officially online "The Gemini Planet Imager is a camera that is designed to take direct photos of exoplanets, alien worlds orbiting other stars. In a test run last November it spotted the exoplanet Beta Pictoris b, a dusty ring around a nearby star, and even snapped a portrait of Jupiter's moon Europa. Up to now, only about a dozen exoplanets have been directly imaged; GPI is expected to find dozens more in the next few years."
From the Gemini project: "'Even these early first-light images are almost a factor of 10 better than the previous generation of instruments. In one minute, we are seeing planets that used to take us an hour to detect,' says Bruce Macintosh of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory who led the team that built the instrument." The announcement has pictures.
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I doubt it would work very well. Near earth objects would be moving fast, and be at unknown location, while this is designed to look at steady known object with really long exposure time and probably very narrow field of view.
Oh! Sure.... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Oh! Sure.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh! Sure. They can take images of planets light years away, against the light pollution of the planet's sun, but somehow they don't have the resolving power to image the license plate on the lunar rover to silence the moon landing deniers.
They would just claim that the pics of the landing sites were photoshopped so why bother entertaining their delusion?
Re:Oh! Sure.... (Score:4, Funny)
Someone had convinced one of my co-irkers that the original Apollo 8 'Earthrise' image was Photoshopped (I'm **hoping** as a joke). He seemed surprised to hear that Photoshop didn't exist in 1968.
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+1 for introducing the term "co-irkers" to my permanent working vocabulary! :-)
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Actually, you can't tell anything from the picture, because there's no scale. Is the 25 pixel blob 1.65*Jupiter? Is the solar "blackout" disk 1.8 solar radii? Is the distance from the center of the blackout disk to the center of the blob 8 AU or 1, or something else ent
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there is such a photo, taken at the site where they faked the landing. 8D
Rude gestures from other worlds (Score:5, Funny)
One of the first pictures we snapped was of a totally unnecessary gesture from a very impolite world in the Andromeda region.
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It's pretty much the only undeniably bad thing Obama has a personal responsibility for, so anyone with a political axe to grind has to bring it up. And it's not like my thinking Obama was better than any other viable choice makes the NSA thing defensible in any way, shape, or form.
But yeah, someone managed to drag the NSA into a super-volcano discussion the other day, so, please, stick to security, us politics, and similar subjects for tired old discussions, please. There's plenty. We haven't forgotten t
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That was bad, but, come on, it was newly released software. Have you never been spared using a v0.X of anything?
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It's funny, but the NSA actually has the best telescopes and has donated some of their old ones to NASA [space.com].
RECEIVING MESSAGE...JUST A MOMENT (Score:1)
Europa
Attempt No
Landing There
Use Them Together
Use Them In Peace
Re:RECEIVING MESSAGE...JUST A MOMENT (Score:5, Funny)
Burma Shave.
Cheese (Score:2)
Just tell me where the cheese is.
International project (Score:2)
GPI is an international project led by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL)
Good to see international cooperation on a project like this. No reason for the US to go it alone.
Breathtaking (Score:5, Interesting)
Well done, GPI team.
I don't know about you, but for me this is absolutely thrilling. We're no longer inferring the existence of other planets, we're actually LOOKING at them.
The word "breathtaking" doesn't cover it.
And from a ground-based camera...I knew imaging tech is leaping ahead, but this makes me absolutely excited to see what the GPI (and eventually, hopefully, the JWST) will see over the next years.
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This is a very interesting moment in time. At this rate of development, it is quite possible that in a decade or two we'd have full spectrographic analysis of the atmospheres of a handful of words. This might not be the ones best suited to sustain life, but we might get to those as well. Can't wait!
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And from a ground-based camera...
Oh, wait, what?! And here I was remarking that the image of Europa was fantastic for an Earth-orbit telescope.
I'll see your 'breathtaking' and raise you one 'astonishing'.
How far we've come (Score:5, Interesting)
It was only detected by gravitational wobble. Prior to that psuedo-exoplanets had been discovered but they involved non-solar system type objects such as pulsars. After the 1995 discovery, scientists slowly made more discoveries based on planetary wobble. At that time, the ability to take pictures like what we have seen in this article seemed farther flung into the future than we are now - if possible at all. But science is persistent and new technologies were developed fast. Now here we are imaging planets as they orbit their stars and the technology to image them continues to accelerate and advance at breakneck speed. If the development of scientific instruments were a race, planet finding and the LHC would at least be neck and neck if not having planet find slightly in the lead. There is preliminary work going on that promises views of extrasolar planets at resolutions as high as viewing the moons of the outer planets with our best telescopes - some say it may be possible to image planets with the resolution of looking back at the Earth from the moon. Is there no obstacle to discovery science cannot overcome? Time will tell. These new ultra-resolution planet find tools are hoped to be developed and ready by 2025, When I consider how far we have come and fast fast, I am inclined to believe we may actually get those images in that timeframe - despite how far fetched that kind of resolution may seem today.
Online? (Score:1)
Beta Pectoris? (Score:2)
You mean it has muscles?
Can't wait for more pixels (Score:2)
These pictures are 6px by 6px. With 30 or so pixels squared you can start to really make out stuff. Compare to our recent Juno probe's view of the Earth Moon system [youtube.com] as it passed us on it's way to Jupiter (it will go past us twice).
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The pixels are smaller than the actual resolution of the telescope, and the point spread function is just smearing the light from the entire planet over several pixels. You would need pixels and resolution several thousand time smaller to see distinct details from the planet, which would require a telescope much larger due to diffraction limits.
Yes, I know. What we could do with is a space based telesope array better than the James Webb, which is yet to be launched. This would remove some of the problems with single lens size limits and light interference if we put it in a good observation spot.