Never-Before-Seen Alien Planet Imaged Directly in New Photo

http://www.space.com/21395-alien-planet-direct-image.html

by obeone • 13 years ago

82 40 13 years ago

untog2• 13 years ago

Images like this never got me excited about space as a kid. But I remember the first time I saw the images from Pathfinder, and it blew my mind:

http://www-k12.atmos.washington.edu/k12/mars/nasa_jpl_mpf_pi...

It's very weird, because on the face of it, it just looks like desert. But then you remember you are looking at the surface of a totally different planet.

dm23• 13 years ago

This doesn't leave you awestruck? http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/0803/lh95_hst_big.jpg

I remember looking at that picture a while ago and thinking that it sucks that we'll never get to visit any of those million/billion/unlimited planets. Maybe in 1000 years they will be able to jump between planets with ease, but I don't think anyone alive today will ever be able to set foot on anything except Earth, the Moon, and Mars.

sliverstorm3• 13 years ago

I think the point is that, as a kid, no. Because children are still developing their abstract thinking skills, stars are just pretty lights.

They might "know" that stars are other suns with other planets, but they have even more trouble truly grasping that than you or I- and even I struggle sometimes to "see" the planets and suns amongst the twinkly lights.

untog2• 13 years ago

Honestly? No. It doesn't. It's very pretty, but it's very abstract. The fact that hidden in there somewhere is a planet very similar to the one I know and love isn't apparent. Yes, I am capable of imagining such things, but it's a pipe dream compared to actual photos of a real landing.

kevinconroy• 13 years ago

Holy bad user interface Batman! Here's a direct link to the picture.

The planet is the blue dot on the bottom left. They removed the light from this star, which is the photoshopped "star" in the middle.

http://i.space.com/images/i/000/029/551/original/exoplanet-h...

gcb0• 13 years ago

it's sad to see the kind of Ads science sites have to show.

ChuckMcM2• 13 years ago

space.com is particularly cheesy in this regard. I stopped visiting voluntarily (sometimes I get click jacked there)

standeven• 13 years ago

I'm curious how close we are to being able to image planets to detect unnatural light. Searching for alien light pollution from planets found by Kepler would be pretty neat.

deletes2• 13 years ago

I once listened to a lecture/book from Neil deGrasse Tyson and he mentioned that for distanced over 500 lightyears, it is pretty much impossible to see any kind of artificial light from a planet. The telescope would have to be kilometers in diameter. I think the main problem is the local star and its brightness.

Interesting question regarding telescope limits: http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/17881/is-there-a-...

EthanHeilman• 13 years ago

Is building a Kilometer sized telescopes really that difficult? What about a formation of satellites.

Impossible is a pretty strong word to use for something that is possible but economically infeasible given current technology. I'd be curious to NDT reasoning on the subject.

lolcraft• 13 years ago

... we already do. It's called radio :)

charonn02• 13 years ago

I wonder if anyone ever peers back at us as intensely as we peer out.

cmsmith• 13 years ago

It seems unlikely that they would be peering in a way we would expect, considering that out of the billion-year history of life on a given planet, 100 years ago we weren't looking at all and 100 years from now we may be looking in entirely new ways.

obviouslygreen• 13 years ago

I think "a way we would expect" would be kind of precluded by the fact that, if something were looking back, it probably would've had to develop or evolve some sort of perception/method of observation that we don't have access to, otherwise we'd have a much easier time accomplishing said feat. :)

dm23• 13 years ago

That's true. I've never considered that before.

What limits space photography? I just realized I know nothing about digital photography either...

alex_doom• 13 years ago

I've pondered this many times. My conclusion is that it took billions of years for a planet to get to a point for sustainable life, and then billions more to get where we are and considering we've only been here for a blink of an eye. There may be other areas of life but they are so far flung across the known universe we're not going to discover each other anytime soon.

It would be like a colony of ants in San Francisco looking for others but the nearest one is in Paris.

cryptoz• 13 years ago

If those ants spent centuries or millennia building giant machines that could see Paris from San Francisco, they'll eventually succeed in making contact. Additionally, if anyone in Paris is looking, the ants in SF have made quite the attention-grabbing scene thus increasing the odds of being contacted. This also makes it seem likely that we'll never find living aliens, but will find plenty of million-year-old machines.

sliverstorm3• 13 years ago

Us in particular, or just in our direction?

If you mean us in particular- doubtful. Hell, out of all the stars in the sky, I can name maybe two? Three?

If you mean in our direction, that depends on whether we are part of some cool space feature, ala the Horsehead Nebula. So maybe- but I have no idea what the odds of being in a cool space feature vs. not are. Only that they are better than Sol being picked out individually.

charonn02• 13 years ago

I mean both. When we look out into space, we're not looking at/for anyone in particular. I think all features of the Universe from any perspective are by definition worth peering at. Similar to the interesting number paradox.[1] Look at the Hubble Deep Field, for example[2]; that photo was taken of an evidently starless/empty patch of sky.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interesting_number_paradox [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Deep_Field

VladRussian22• 13 years ago

is it my eyes or the image has some filament structure?

deletes2• 13 years ago

Atmospheric distortion?

pcrh• 13 years ago

It seems that one of the "background" blobs is aligned with the exoplanet.

glogla• 13 years ago

There's filament alright [1], but I don't think it is visible on this scale, so it is probably something else.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galactic_filament

mturmon• 13 years ago

It could also be an artifact of the image reconstruction technique. It may be able to suppress high-spatial-frequency noise (salt-and-pepper) but not low-spatial-frequency noise (for example).

Or, the algorithm may introduce artifacts due to modeling errors (say, imperfectly suppressing scattered light from the main star).

Like the structures that you see in sonograms or some CT images.

leephillips• 13 years ago

Go to the original ESO page instead of this retread teeming with hideous advertisements:

http://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1324/

sbierwagen• 13 years ago

See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Worlds_Mission a proposed $3B space-based occluder, to be used to directly image exoplanets with space-based telescopes.

barkingcat• 13 years ago

I guess I'm the only one who read that as "Alien Plant" - I was excited to see that space.com was posting about alien life!

insickness• 13 years ago

Okay I'm trying to understand exactly what we're looking at. So apparently the star has been blacked out in order to see the exoplanet which is on the lower left. It says here that the blue circle is the size of Neptune's orbit around the sun:

http://www.eso.org/public/images/eso1324a/

But how big is the star in relation to this? Is the star the size of the blue circle or is it smaller like the size of the white flash shape in the middle? If it's the size of the blue circle, that's a REALLY close orbit for a planet. If the star is the size of the white flash shape in the middle, that makes more sense, except that the star looks almost the same size as the planet.

luke_s• 13 years ago

I would imagine that both the star and the planet if actually shown properly 'to scale' in the image would be tiny pin pricks. What you would see if you were 'standing there' is quite different to what you see in the image.

The fact that the planet and star appear much larger is probably caused by a few factors - firstly the planet is probably only taking up a few pixels on the telescopes CCD - The image has been enlarged and post processed.

Secondly the telescope will be affected by diffraction which means you will not get a proper single tiny point of light and instead will get something like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Airy-pattern.svg

Finally you need to deal with all the air that the light has to travel through before hitting the telescopes CCD - this will distort the final image, like looking at the bottom of a pond through ripples.

Never-Before-Seen Alien Planet Imaged Directly in New Photo

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