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Space Science Technology

Possible First Photo Of Extra-Solar Planet 40

Posted by timothy from the baltimore-is-a-stellar-town dept.
dtolman writes "Space.com is reporting that the first direct image of an extra-solar planet may have been made using a new technique with the Hubble telescope. Confirmation will be made in the next few months by reimaging the star, and seeing if the planet candidate has actually changed in its orbital position."
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Possible First Photo Of Extra-Solar Planet More

Possible First Photo Of Extra-Solar Planet

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  • Not that interesting (?) (Score:4, Interesting)

    by clausiam ( 609879 ) on Monday May 10, 2004 @11:00PM (#9113434)
    The article itself says that extra-solar planets have been detected for more than 10 years via gravitational observations. The fact that this one is photographed doesn't seem to add the much more interest to it since the "photograph" will probably be something only scientist working directly with this technique would recognize as anything but background noise.

    Claus

    • Re:Not that interesting (?) (Score:5, Insightful)

      by snake_dad ( 311844 ) on Tuesday May 11, 2004 @05:06AM (#9114862) Homepage Journal
      Are you kidding? Until recently it was not even possible to resolve a star as a disc (with the exception of that yellow thing that's supposed to be in the sky during the day), and now, possibly, we see, not detect, a planet outside our own solar system for the first time! As the article says, this is at the limit of current technology, so no wonder it is hard to detect. What did you expect? Beautiful pictures of weather patterns? Volcanos?

      It is sad to see that even here, buried in the science section, people can be so casual and dismissive about what could become one of the biggest break-throughs in astronomy.

      • Re:Not that interesting (?) (Score:3, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Not to mention that by sending it's photons, it's sending it's spectra which can tell us all sorts of things.

    • Re:Not that interesting (?) (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Satai ( 111172 ) * on Tuesday May 11, 2004 @06:54AM (#9115145)
      Not true. I've seen Debes' photos, and I'm sure if you dig hard enough you can find them as well. What they look like is a central star that has been removed (some artifacts remain) with a spike in signal some distance away. The planet may not be resolved to any real detail, but that doesn't detract from the fact that it's a direct imaging.
    • This is great. It could be the first visual evidence of an extrasolar planet. Keep in mind that there are still people who disbelieve the moon-landing [nasa.gov], that the earth is round [alaska.net], etc.

      I know that there was some digital processing done on these images, but there really is some truth to "seeing is believing" (except for some "news" [unfaith.net] on the internet). Besides, this is the first attempt. Think of how many great discoveries started out as "not that interesting."

  • In memory of Douglas Adams... (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    ...can we name it Rupert [hhgproject.org]? I know, I know, it's extra-solar. But wouldn't it be fun?

  • Hubble! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Visigothe ( 3176 ) on Monday May 10, 2004 @11:22PM (#9113589) Homepage
    And to think, with all the advancements that Hubble is making, they still want to decommission the thing. I can understand decommissioning it when we launch fully function-equivalent replacements, but not "because the shuttle is too dangerous and we can't be bothered to go up and move Hubble out of the decaying orbit".

    Sigh

    • Re:Hubble! (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Radical Rad ( 138892 ) on Monday May 10, 2004 @11:56PM (#9113799) Homepage
      And to think, with all the advancements that Hubble is making, they still want to decommission the thing.

      Maybe they are suggesting decommisioning the Hubble for the same reason that schools often cut extracurricular sports first when budgets get tight. If it is something people care about, they will cough up the money. Hubble is fantastic but expensive to operate and they might have to cut dozens of smaller programs to equal the savings from mothballing it. Joe Sixpack certainly wouldn't agree to pay for all those other programs but he might be willing to pay for just one especially since he gets cool wallpapers for his desktop from it.

      According to this article [washington.edu] Hubble has cost about 2B plus about 2B more in operating costs while its replacement will supposedly cost a total of about 1.2 B. Of course, when is the last time something came in under budget? But even a savings of just a couple billion adds up to a lot of science that can be done elsewhere. 2B or not 2B? That is the question. (couldn't resist)

      • Re:Hubble! (Score:5, Insightful)

        by captainktainer ( 588167 ) <[moc.oohay] [ta] [reniatkniatpac]> on Tuesday May 11, 2004 @12:16AM (#9113899)
        Maybe they are suggesting decommisioning the Hubble for the same reason that schools often cut extracurricular sports first when budgets get tight

        Pardon me... but what schools are you speaking of? At least in Florida, the first things they cut are sciences and arts; extracurricular sports are the last to go. Even when they can't afford classrooms for all of the students, they still build new stadiums.

        Hubble is our most powerful telescope... and while telescopic observations aren't exactly going to bring about a revolution in telecommunications, if we're going to study the heavens, planet-watching strikes me as a damned good goal.

        • Re:Hubble! (Score:1, Insightful)

          by Anonymous Coward

          I think he was referring to school districts with halfway intelligent board members.

          • Re:Hubble! (Score:1, Funny)

            by Anonymous Coward
            In the first place God made idiots. That was for practice. Then he made School Boards.
            -----Mark Twain
        • Pardon me... but what schools are you speaking of? ... Even when they can't afford classrooms for all of the students, they still build new stadiums.

          I didn't realize that it wouldn't be obvious to everyone, but I was talking about K-12.

          • K-12 public schools in Florida, and I assume in other parts of the US, put sports (particularly Football) above all other issues, including academics. While I hope this is not the case in every school district, it is definately true in the county that I grew up in. (Lee)
            • It's the same in Orange County, and Polk, from what I understand.

              School Boards appear to have figured out that successful sports teams get them in the papers, and get nice fat donations from the parents of the kids on the sports teams. Not enough to cover the amounts they're siphoning out of academics, but certain enough to look good on fundraisers' resumes.

              NASA appears to be taking the opposite approach. The Hubble is beloved by astronomers and laymen alike, but NASA's killing it for cheaper projects. Fo
        • Hubble is our most powerful telescope

          Actually no. Using adaptive optics with large ground based scopes (Keck, VLT) you can get some amazing images. Not that Hubble is in any way bad. It's just not the most "powerful" scope we have.

          The Hubble is a 2.4m mirror. The Keck is a 10m, and the VLT is 4 8m mirrors. Adaptive Optics [eso.org] is really quite good at reducing atmospheric noise in images.

    • "because the shuttle is too dangerous and we can't be bothered to go up and move Hubble out of the decaying orbit"

      Go look at the astronaut biographies [nasa.gov] and tell us the names of those you are willing to have die to service Hubble. What is the basis of your decisions and are you placing importance upon their skills or whether they are married?

      • "Go look at the astronaut biographies [nasa.gov] and tell us the names of those you are willing to have die to service Hubble."

        Compared to this most recent war in Iraq (admittadly I have no statistics to back up my claim,) I'm sure that more American lives have been lost there than in the entire history of NASA. And Bush wants to spend loads of money on that war which, let's face it, is going nowhere and has recently turned into an even bigger embarassment.

        I think that losing human life for greater sci

  • I'll be impressed... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by eingram ( 633624 ) on Monday May 10, 2004 @11:51PM (#9113765)
    ...when I see this planet's natural satellites!

    Joking aside, this is pretty cool. But the star is a white dwarf. Will this technique work (if it even works now) on brighter, bigger stars?
    • It should if I understood the article. The method they might be using is one where the wavelengths of the light neutralize each other after the combination of the two pictures. I am by no means an expert on the subject, being only a junior in a high school that has little to offer in the science department, but I do take great intrest in these types of things and if I am incorrect, please post how NASA really does do it.

      • Re:I'll be impressed... (Score:5, Informative)

        by TMB ( 70166 ) on Tuesday May 11, 2004 @12:51PM (#9117949)

        No, you're thinking about nulling interferometry [unisci.com], which is also very cool. :-)

        What they're doing is a bit more straightforward. When you observe a point source with HST, the diffraction of the light off the supports and mirror give you a somewhat complicated not-really-symmetric pattern called the Point Spread Function (PSF). To detect a faint source right near a bright source, you need to subtract off the bright star, which means you need to know the PSF really really well so that you don't mistake some leftover light that's really from the primary as a companion.

        What they're doing is observing the same field twice, once rotated slightly. The PSF doesn't depend on how the field is oriented, so faint spots that are rotated are real while ones that aren't rotated are due to instrumental effects. This means you can look at much fainter things and know if they're real or not.

        To answer the original question, it will be harder the brighter the primary is... I don't know exactly what they're limits are, but it may be possible to push it to brighter stars. Working in the near-infrared, which they're doing, will help. But white dwarfs are pretty faint, so I'm not sure how much brighter a star you could get away with.

        [TMB]

    • ...when I see this planet's artificial satellites!

  • Naming conventions (Score:4, Interesting)

    by karmatic ( 776420 ) on Tuesday May 11, 2004 @12:08AM (#9113861)
    Does anyone know what the internationally accepted method of naming such a planet is? Is it simply the first person to record it can name it, or is there a more beaurocratic system in place?

    • Re:Naming conventions (Score:5, Informative)

      by shiwala ( 93327 ) on Tuesday May 11, 2004 @12:50AM (#9114052)
      From the IAU website [iau.org]...

      "In response to frequent questions about plans to assign actual names to extra-solar planets, the IAU sees no need and has no plan to assign names to these objects at the present stage of our knowledge. Indeed, if planets are found to occur very frequently in the Universe, a system of individual names for planets might well rapidly be found equally impracticable as it is for stars, as planet discoveries progress."

      Of course, that page was modified back in '01. Maybe there's an actual system in place now?

      Russia. Planets. Name. You.

    • Re:Naming conventions (Score:4, Informative)

      by astroboscope ( 543876 ) <.moc.liamg. .ta. .epocsobortsa.> on Tuesday May 11, 2004 @01:48AM (#9114249) Homepage
      It seems to be

      Star-name Letter

      where letter goes from A to Z with decreasing mass, i.e. Upsilon Andromeda A, Upsilon Andromeda B, ...
      • It seems to be

        Star-name Letter

        Clearly someone hasn't been watching enough Star Trek. "This is Alpha Ceti V!"

        • Re:Naming conventions (Score:4, Insightful)

          by nimblebrain ( 683478 ) on Wednesday May 12, 2004 @04:51AM (#9124788) Homepage Journal

          *laugh* The star name + letter combination will have to do for the meantime. The roman numeral convention assumes that we know all the planets in a star system, so Earth being Sol III and Mars being Sol IV is just grand for us.

          For jolly gas giants around far stars, though, we don't know whether there are any other planets in orbit, or at the very least, we don't know how many other planets there are. Someone observing our system with the equivalent of our current technology wouldn't even be able to discern Jupiter or Saturn.

          When we somehow (and I'd love to see how!) manage to figure out an entire remote planetary system, perhaps we'll switch back to roman numerals :)

          Celestia [shatters.net] keeps relatively up to date with discovered extrasolar planets, and it uses the star + letter convention. Obviously, though, the planet texture used when you go visit the planet is merely a guess :)

  • Unfortunately, the only computer available to process the image was a TRS-80, with it's deluxe CGI graphics.

  • NASA can finally claim FP! (Score:3, Funny)

    by shachart ( 471014 ) <shachar-slashdot ... ac.il minus city> on Tuesday May 11, 2004 @01:53AM (#9114265)
    First Photo...

  • I tried to take a better pic of it... (Score:3, Funny)

    by NanoGator ( 522640 ) on Tuesday May 11, 2004 @02:36AM (#9114366) Homepage Journal
    ... but it was being defended by the Spathi.

  • Common proper motion, not orbital change (Score:5, Informative)

    by TMB ( 70166 ) on Tuesday May 11, 2004 @12:37PM (#9117760)
    The blurb is slightly inaccurate... the follow-up observations aren't going to see if the object has moved around in its orbit (the distance between the primary and companion is larger than the orbit of Neptune, and the primary is a white dwarf so probably about 0.6 times the mass of the sun... from Kepler's laws, that means the period is 67% longer than Neptune's period, or about 275 years... so in 6 months it won't go very far!).

    What they're going to look for is common proper motion... the white dwarf appears to move across the sky due to some combination of its motion in space and ours. If the candidate companion shows the same proper motion after 6 months, it is probably physically associated.

    [TMB]

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