It would appear that yet another extrasolar planet has been directly observed!

Only last week, the Hubble Space Telescope released news that it had spotted an exoplanet orbiting the star Fomalhaut. This is the first ever direct observation of an exoplanet in optical wavelengths. On the same day, joint observations by the ground-based (adaptive optics-powered) Keck II and Gemini infrared telescopes discovered a collection of three large alien worlds orbiting a star catalogued as HR 8799.

Today, a completely different observatory appears to have discovered yet another exoplanet orbiting the hot star Beta Pictoris (in the constellation of Pictor). European Southern Observatory (ESO) astronomers have directly imaged β Pictoris b, an alien planet orbiting 8 AU from its host star.

A phenomenal achievement considering β Pictoris is over 63 light years away…

An artist impression of the well-known dusty disk surrounding β Pictoris (NASA)

It has been known for a very long time that β Pictoris is surrounded by a dusty disk of debris. In fact, astronomers have even gone as far as uncovering cometary activity around the A6V star by analysing the warped planetary disk. It was thought this warping was caused by a massive planet orbiting the star — it would appear they were right.

“These are indirect, but tell-tale signs that strongly suggest the presence of a massive planet lying between 5 and 10 times the mean Earth-Sun distance from its host star,” said Anne-Marie Lagrange, team leader of this discovery. “However, probing the very inner region of the disc, so close to the glowing star, is a most challenging task.”

Hubble image of the dusty disk surrounding Beta Pictoris (NASA)

For a long time, the French team astronomers at the ESO have been analysing near-infrared wavelengths observed by the Very Large Telescope (VLT) based in the Atacama desert, northern Chile, to characterise β Pictoris and its surrounding disk. The main advantage of the VLT is the system’s utilization of adaptive optics that cancel out turbulent effects in the Earth’s atmosphere. This enables astronomers to observe distant stars with outstanding clarity and detail.

According to the ESO press release, the VLT is very well-suited for exoplanet searches. By using a novel approach by Lagrange’s team, the French researchers were able to deduce that the body orbiting the host star was in fact the massive planet thought to be in the β Pictoris system. “Our observations point to the presence of a giant planet, about 8 times as massive as Jupiter and with a projected distance from its star of about 8 times the Earth-Sun distance, which is about the distance of Saturn in our Solar System,” said Lagrange.

Therefore, β Pictoris b has the tightest stellar orbit of any of the previously discovered exoplanets.

The exoplanets observed so far, including distances (in AU) from their host stars. β Pictoris b is by far the tightest-orbiting exoplanet observed to date (ESO)

The exoplanet hunters have worked hard to establish whether this new discovery is in fact and exoplanet and so far, it appears to be the case. However, on analysing Hubble data, no planetary body was obvious around β Pictoris, but this is not too surprising as the alien world has such a tight orbit around the star. Although more observations are required, the researchers are very confident they have added another direct observation of an extrasolar planet to the growing list…

Source: ESO

OK, here’s another round-up of links I found during the last week. Have fun.

A Theremin (remember Good Vibrations?) inside a Russian doll. (Via Mojo.)

A friend of mine once rewrote Monty Python’s Dead Parrot Sketch as the Dead Church Sketch. But now we learn that the ancient Greeks pre-empted the dead parrot sketch.

Jesus spoke about lust as ‘adultery of the heart’. Now, a ‘virtual affair’ in Second Life has led to a divorce.

The Today programme on BBC Radio 4 ponders great drum solos.

Remember the Johnny Cash song ‘One piece at a time’? Well, a Russian Orthodox church has been stolen, brick by brick.

Once it was pizzas looking like Jesus, now it’s Buddha bee hives.

You want a prayer movement – how about this? Artist creates ‘public prayer booths’ in NYC. They look like phone booths, apparently.

If only this were true: hoax New York Times newspaper proclaims end of Iraq war.

My father has a life-long interest in astronomy. Doubtless he will have been excited to read about the Hubble Telescope spotting a planet orbiting the star Fomalhaut and the planetary system discovered by the Gemini Observatory in Chile. (Both links via Personal Computer World‘s weekly email.)

Ruth Haley Barton has written on the loneliness of leadership: loneliness drives us to seek the presence of God rather than any notion of the Promised Land.

Unhappy people watch more TV. ’TV doesn’t really seem to satisfy people over the long haul the way that social involvement or reading a newspaper does,’ says researcher John P. Robinson.

Go on, you want to make cake in a mug.

MyBloop - unlimited free online storage, max file size 1 GB. Via Chris Pirillo.

Twenty hated clichés. In contrast, here are James Emery White’s top five irritating Christian phrases. ]]> http://ungaman.wordpress.com/2008/11/18/primer-planeta-extrasolar-fotografiado-directamente/ Tue, 18 Nov 2008 00:37:13 +0000 Julio Vannini http://ungaman.wordpress.com/2008/11/18/primer-planeta-extrasolar-fotografiado-directamente/ http://mindsoup.wordpress.com/2008/11/16/and-now-photographs-of-a-planet-around-another-star/ Sun, 16 Nov 2008 12:47:57 +0000 Greg Stone http://mindsoup.wordpress.com/2008/11/16/and-now-photographs-of-a-planet-around-another-star/ I have a soft spot in my heart for the “friendly star” Fomalhaut and now I find it even more interesting, for they have actually been able to photograph, for the first time, a planet (almost certainly) orbiting another star. This is a great time of year to get a peak at Fomalhaut, easily visible to the naked eye, though you’ll see it’s planet only with your mind’s eye. More on this in a moment.

Frist, here’s a portion of a relevant press release with images from NASA.

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has taken the first visible-light snapshot of a planet circling another star.

Estimated to be no more than three times Jupiter’s mass, the planet, called Fomalhaut b, orbits the bright southern star Fomalhaut, located 25 light-years away in the constellation Piscis Australis (the Southern Fish).

Fomalhaut has been a candidate for planet hunting ever since an excess of dust was discovered around the star in the early 1980s by NASA’s Infrared Astronomy Satellite (IRAS).

In 2004, the coronagraph in the High Resolution Camera on Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys produced the first-ever resolved visible-light image of a large dust belt surrounding Fomalhaut. It clearly showed that this structure is in fact a ring of protoplanetary debris approximately 21.5 billion miles across with a sharp inner edge.

This large debris disk is similar to the Kuiper Belt, which encircles the solar system and contains a range of icy bodies from dust grains to objects the size of dwarf planets, such as Pluto.

Chart provided by NASA showing that the suspected planet is far from its star in this youthful solar system.

Hubble astronomer Paul Kalas, of the University of California at Berkeley, and team members proposed in 2005 that the ring was being gravitationally modified by a planet lying between the star and the ring’s inner edge.

Circumstantial evidence came from Hubble’s confirmation that the ring is offset from the center of the star. The sharp inner edge of the ring is also consistent with the presence of a planet that gravitationally “shepherds” ring particles. Independent researchers have subsequently reached similar conclusions.

Now, Hubble has actually photographed a point source of light lying 1.8 billion miles inside the ring’s inner edge. The results are being reported in the November 13 issue of Science magazine.

“Our Hubble observations were incredibly demanding. Fomalhaut b is 1 billion times fainter than the star. We began this program in 2001, and our persistence finally paid off,” Kalas says.

“Fomalhaut is the gift that keeps on giving. Following the unexpected discovery of its dust ring, we have now found an exoplanet at a location suggested by analysis of the dust ring’s shape. The lesson for exoplanet hunters is ‘follow the dust,’” says team member Mark Clampin of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

Now – about seeing Fomalhaut yourself. My direction are for folks living in mid-northern latitudes, such as I am – roughly 40 degrees north. For me, Fomalhaut is readily visible as a bright star – the only bright star – that at 7 pm EST is roughly 20 degrees above my horizon when facing due south. This is true for the next week or two, but the time when it is due south will get steadily earlier by roughly 4 minutes a day. For a more generic finder guide, use this photo-chart from NASA.

Photo-chart showing location of Fomalhaut relative to other prominent stars.

Last year I described Fomalhaut this way to my observing class:

Fomalhaut, we hardly know thee!

No kidding. I think of this as the loneliest of our Friendly Stars because there just isn’t much around it in our sky. I seldom see it from Driftway, and no one seems to agree upon how to pronounce it’s name. (I use: FO-mal-ought.) In the past couple of years Fomalhaut has become one the most interesting stars because it seems to include an evolving planetary system that Hubble has actually imaged.

In the list of the 200 brightest stars, it is a respectable 18th at magnitude 1.16 and a distance of just 22 light years (or 25 depending on who you want to believe It’s also young – a few million years old – and a bit larger than our Sun.

The term “friendly stars” comes from the turn-of-the-century book “The Friendly Stars” by Martha Evans Martin, Published by Harper & brothers, 1907. I love this book and think it’s basic idea – teach the brightest stars, not the constellations as such – remains the best way to become familiar with the night sky.

Which naturally published the doctored / falsified version of the image. In fact the DomPost even saw fit to put the word “Star” next to the doctored / falsified part of the image.

Confused? Have a look at these two pictures … just point your mouse over the links to see each one in preview, or click through for the full image.

First the real picture.

And here’s the doctored one (from Granny Herald’s site and minus the “Star” caption – the story doesn’t seem to have made it to the DomPost site yet, unfortunately.)

See the white dot of a star that the ‘media’ have painted in in the centre? It completely changes the context of the picture and manages to submerge the whole significance of the story.

The doctored picture shows a star in visible light surrounded by a bunch of very bright dust (the same as this one does) and a faint planet. If that were the case, we should be finding planets like this as a matter of routine. It wouldn’t even be that hard to spot without the inset, if the doctored photo were the real thing. And I’d be curious about why the black space between the star and the dust is such an odd shape. That must be some kind of weird gravitational effect unknown to science so far.

Which it’s not, at all.

The real picture shows a visible light signal pushed to such extremes of resolution that the light from the star in the centre has had to be artificially removed so as not to overpower the image (high-tech: they put a wee bar across the centre of the ‘scope’s lens to block out the brightest bits). It shows what’s probably a planet just discernible against a sea of visible-light background noise. It’s what you’d expect to see when the resolution of visible light is pushed to the limits of today’s technology. Which it is. Which it has to be for doing things like spotting dim planets orbiting very bright stars.

Fomalhaut (the star in the centre) is the 18th brightest star in the skies and, unlike Granny appears to suggest in the caption of this image, it is visible with the naked eye. Including its intensity in the image would have completely drowned it, and Fomalhaut b – as the candidate planet is unimaginatively named, so far – would have gone unseen.

So the ‘news media’ stuck it back in for us. Thanks, guys. Brilliant. Brilliant misrepresentation of some truly brilliant science.

Now I know not everyone is going to get as hot under the collar as me about something like this, but the next time you have to listen to someone droning on about how the web has got so much crap on it and you can’t believe what you see there, feel free to use this story on them. Do it with vigour. And ask them if they believe everything they see in the newspapers.

Foto del primo pianeta extrasolare

Caldo, gassoso e con un anno di 318.280 giorni

Fomalhaut b. Un nome orrendo per la scoperta astronomica che apre il millennio. E’ il primo pianeta fotografato al di fuori del nostro sistema solare. Per arrivarci, viaggiando alla velocità della luce (circa 300.000 km al secondo) ci vogliono 25 anni; ma il telescopio Hubble della Nasa che orbita attorno alla Terra a 600 km di altezza, ci ha messo 7 anni a scovarlo quando si è orientato verso la costellazione del Pesce australe, vicino a Fomalhaut, un Sole giovane che ha soltanto 200 milioni di anni e brilla 16 volte più del nostro. Il risultato della ricerca è del prof. Paul Kalas dell’Università californiana di Berkeley. Anche se appare solo un puntino giallo che si perde di fronte alla massa della sua stella di riferimento, si tratta di un pianeta grande forse tre volte Giove; è gassoso e caldo e pare dotato di anelli come Saturno. Un anno su Fomalhaut b. è lungo da passare: dura infatti 872 dei nostri. E’ il primo pianeta extra sistema solare in assoluto ad essere stato fotografato, mentre di altri 300 gli astronomi hanno solo la percezione dell’esistenza per via di anomalie registrate da parte delle rispettive stelle madri. A questo punto gli scienziati ipotizzano che, più distanziato dal Sole Fomalhaut, vi possa essere anche un pianeta ospitale come la Terra. Per scoprirlo bisognerà attendere l’invio di James Webb Space Telescope, il “figlio” di Hubble che sarà lanciato in orbita nel 2013, 23 anni dopo il suo grande papà. (foto NASA)

The day has finally come. We now have direct, infrared and optical observations of planets orbiting other stars. Yesterday, reports from two independent sources surfaced, one from the Gemini and Keck II observatories and the second from the Hubble Space Telescope. Brace yourself for an awe-inspiring display of planets orbiting two stars…

The Gemini/Keck observations were carried out using adaptive optics technology to correct in real-time for atmospheric turbulence. The stunning images of a multiple planetary star system were then constructed from infrared emissions (the image, top, was constructed by Keck II as a follow-up to to the Gemini observations). The system in question is centred around a star called HR 8799, approximately 130 light years from Earth and in the constellation of Pegasus. The entire press release can be found at the Gemini observatory site, where they give the discovery a full run-down.

Two of the three confirmed planets orbiting HR 8799 indicated as b and c on the image above. b is the ~7 Jupiter-mass planet orbiting at about 70 AU, c is the ~10 Jupiter-mass planet orbiting the star at about 40 AU. Due to the brightness of the central star, it has been blocked and appears blank in this image to increase visibility of the planets (Gemini Observatory)

On the same day, the Hubble Space Telescope team also released images of one extrasolar planet, only this time in optical wavelengths. Although the exoplanet in Hubble’s images is less obvious than the infrared Gemini/Keck II images, incredible detail has been attained, showing a ring of dust around the star Fomalhaut (located in the constellation of Piscis Austrinus). Fomalhaut is 25 light years away and the star’s daughter planet (Fomalhaut b) is only a little under 3 Jupiter masses.

Estimated to be no more than three times Jupiter's mass, the planet, called Fomalhaut b, orbits the bright southern star Fomalhaut, located 25 light-years away in the constellation Piscis Austrinus (NASA/ESA)

As above, except annotated (NASA/ESA)

For more news on these discoveries, check out the Gemini/Keck II press release and the Hubble announcement. I’ll leave the ground-breaking announcement to the guys who have spent many years working to achieve this monumental goal.

Wow.

Sources: Gemini, ESA

Estimated to be no more than three times Jupiter’s mass, the planet, called Fomalhaut b, orbits the bright southern star Fomalhaut, located 25 light-years away in the constellation Piscis Austrinus (the Southern Fish).

Fomalhaut has been a candidate for planet hunting ever since an excess of dust was discovered around the star in the early 1980s by the US- UK-Dutch Infrared Astronomy Satellite (IRAS).

via ‘Hubble directly observes planet orbiting Fomalhaut’ by EurekAlert – RichardDawkins.net

A truly amazing discovery. 25 light years! Wow. For once I am uncharacteristically at a loss for words.

Gazing into the night sky and trying to find Pegasus or Andromeda or even the Pinwheel Galaxy carries some romance.

I love that we continue to explore what’s beyond our horizon, but staring into the heavens to find HR8799b? Can’t we name it something more alluring? Even if it’s identifying them as a trio with something like Arthur, Guinevere and Lancelot or even Harry, Hermione and Ron. Why name it something that sounds like a bad password?

C’mon, NASA. Whatever happened to imagination? I’m almost positive John Cusak (see Say Anything and Serendipity) will never direct attention toward Fomalhaut in order to point out HR8799 to impress his date.

First, there is a planet that the Hubble Telescope has imaged orbiting Fomalhaut, which is a very bright star in the sky. Fomalhaut b is orbiting at a distance of 18 billion km from Fomalhaut, and appears as only a tiny dot. There’s a ring surrounding the star, as well.

Second, there’s HR8799 and its 3 planets. Bad Astronomy has an image with only 2 of the planets, but there are images available that show all 3 planets (from the Keck Telescope). The Gemini North telescope imaged 2 of the planets. HR8799 is 130 light years from us, and is a bit bigger and brighter than the Sun. The planets orbit at 3.8, 6 and 10.5 billion km from HR8799.

This is very exciting! I’m sure we’ll be seeing more of these images in the near future!

Fomalhaut b is estimated to be about three times the mass of Jupiter and is about 10.7 billion miles from Fomalhaut. It is thought that the planet would take some 872 years to orbit the star.

See images of Fomalhaut b at:
http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2008/39/image/

Information courtesy of Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) and NASA. For more information visit Hubble Site and/or the NASA Press Release.

The images on that page tell the story by themselves, but the post itself explains a lot if you have the patience / interest to read it.

As a bloke with a telescope that’s good enough for looking at the moons of Jupiter or inside lunar craters, I’m seriously gob-smacked. Big time. These are stunning. I wish I had a telescope as big as these guys do. And a camera on it would be nice as well.

What caught my attention though was how fast and how far the Comments thread on the post took off.

It’s still going as I write this, and I’m struck by how fast the ‘knowledgeable’ comments went up there. Sure there was a whole lot of ‘Wow fantastic!’ (possibly by people like me) but the thread started with an element of skepticism – and rightly so, but not for long.

The ‘institutions’ scrambled to get their press releases out as the critical mass of knowledgeable input on the blog post arrived quite quickly. And then it moved into the blogosphere where lots of people (like me and my lunar-scale telescope) lapped it up. And shared it.

C’mon, if you’ve read this far you’ve probably had a look at it already. If not, you’re only reading this because you have nothing better to do, so go and look at some planets. :-)

The comments I have to applaud though, are these ones about the ‘mainstream’ media:

Dan Says: November 13th, 2008 at 4:22 pm CNN’s article on this is hilarious, since they use an artist’s rendering of an extrasolar planet on the main article article page. I mean, it’s not like have a real picture to use now, is there?

Inside the pictures tab, it says that Hubble took a picture of Supernova 1987A in 1987. Which is impressive, considering it was not in orbit until three years later.

And this one:

kuhnigget Says: November 13th, 2008 at 6:10 pm On the Yahoo website, the teaser image for this news story has been doctored to include a bright dot in the center of the void left by the removal of the star. I know it’s just a tease, as the picture in the main story does not include the dot, but still, kind of lame.

Makes ya wonder, doesn’t it… Why the need to re-package (falsify?) reality before peddling it off as ‘news’?

Is synchronicity at work with the US Secondary Progressed Full Moon on Dec 25, 2008 having progressed Sun 4Pis10 – near Fomalhaut’s position? At the least, US Secondary Sun is highlighting Fomalhaut’s principles.

As one of the Royal Stars of Persia, Fomalhaut’s keyphrase is: ‘humanitarian and poetic.’

There’s also something of ‘the mystic’ with a sprinkle of fairy dust connected to Fomalhaut (Alpha Piscis Australis), but as with all four Royal Stars, success may be achieved only if challenges and trials are met, or a temptation is resisted.

The Star’s mystical flavor inspires lofty visions and ideals wherever this Star is linked in a chart, and of course we speak symbolically here since the progressed Sun and Moon (based on or issuing from the natal chart of the US), represents the evolutionary moment in time when Sun and Moon oppose one another by degree, minute, and second. So naturally, Secondary Progressed Moon clocks in at 4Vir10.

Because Sun = the leader, and Moon = the People — and with an opposition always indicating relationships, challenges, and awareness, then December 2008 sees George Bush still in place while the heir apparent waits in the wings all drenched in the fairy dust of a needful people’s expectations. 

Harmony is another component of Fomalhaut’s mystique, but gaining it may involve clashing with mainstream thought. The propagandizing media creates the illusion of a “mainstream” all the time, and mind control from the entertainment world and by news promoters is very prevalent and hard to shake off. Yet we must see clearly through the sparkly fairy dust!

And the digital TV transformation (‘divide’) in Feb 2009 is a good example of what the wheeler dealers are up to – spelled out for the entire world to see. As yet, we really don’t know how manipulative digital TV will be vs the television and media broadcasts we’re grown accustomed to.

Will their manipulation morph into something more subtle than before or will its mission become plain as the snoots on everyone’s faces? We know the TV touters have promised, at minimum, to deliver crystal clear images, haven’t they?

Yet somehow the purity of our ideals or dreams must be maintained.

To me this says that our leaders – governmental, financial, and otherwise – have blown the gig with their corrupt ways against Fomalhaut’s warnings, so it’s up to The People en masse (signified in any national chart by the Moon) to find and take a higher path if it’s been carelessly lost or purposefully obscured by the greedy, fraudulent wheeler dealers and movers’n'shakers who think themselves mightier than the rest.

I’ve blabbed previously about the US Secondary Full Moon (see Page in sidebar) and how it’s the culmination stage of the Sun-Moon cycle, and how it signifies that our ‘light’ has reached its peak and must lessen for a while.

Saturn, the Lesson-Bringer:

The August 2009 transit of Saturn to US natal Neptune, planet of ideals, dreams, and illusions, will be a toughy – it’s the ‘facing grim reality’ transit – plus the elected one with the rock star status is intimately involved – US natal Neptune is conjunct Obama’s natal Mars, the action principle.

So when you entertain the dream or hear of others’ high hopes resting upon Barack Obama’s presidential brow, you’ll know that Saturn will soon bring things down-to-earth – and That’s when the real work begins.

Well, that’s Fomalhaut in a nutshell, and the newly photographed trans-solar-system planet hiding in Fomalhaut’s dust is about to say: Howdy, Earth! for the very first time:

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/news/2008/11/x_from_afar_the_first_optical.php

~:~

* Brady’s Book of Fixed Stars

Why is it difficult to Image the actual planets, one might ask? Well the reason is simple, the distances we deal with are so huge the star simply outshines the planet, making it very difficult to image the planets moving around the star. How does one avoid this problem? The idea is very practical. A occulting bar is used to block out the brightest part of the star’s image so that the blinding light is reduced. Other more specialized techniques can improve things by reducing the light further.

Also another strategy used by professional astronomers looking into deep space for planets over the last two decades has been to focus on systems expected around young stars. The reason being that if the formation of the planetary system is recent the planets would be significantly brighter from the heat of their formation. Much like our early solar system. It would be very difficult to look into space for a planet that is nestled in a star system like that of our Sun of today. This is because the planets would be very very faint (as they would be older and hence colder) and hence very very difficult to image.

However for the first time we have ACTUALLY been able to see extra-solar planets. This is a HUGE step, culminating from years of painstaking observations and focus. These planets are gaseous and probably will have no trace of life. However, the fact that we have been able to image them has a LOT of meaning. Some astronomers have said that it might not be very fantastic to think that we might in a very short time vector be able to observe some Earth like planet that is more likely to have life (carbon based, atleast of the type we know), now this is something that one could not even THINK of some years ago. It was probably fantasy to think we could be able to image planets like our own, now suddenly it looks quite possible.

–

The first image below, taken by the Hubble telescope shows a ring of dust surrounding the star Fomalhaut (derived from the Arabic فم الحوت fum al-ḥawt, meaning “mouth of the whale”) which is only 25 light years away in the constellation Piscis Australis. This star can be seen with the naked eye in the night sky. The lower right inset image is a composite image from the images taken in 2004 and 2006. Paul Kalas and his team of the University of California at Berkeley found out the planet.  This planet completes orbit around its star every 872 years.

[Image Source: HubbleSite]

The radial streaks are scattered starlight. The planet’s temperature is 260 degrees, quite cool compared to other exoplanets. This dot is about three times the weight of Jupiter and about three times as far from the star as compared to how far Pluto is from our sun. This dusty ring around Fomalhaut is suspected to be something like the Kuiper belt of our solar system.

This star system was expected to have planets in 2005.

The following is a video on the same:

A ring of dust surrounds the star Fomalhaut. Images taken with the Hubble Space Telescope in 2004 and 2006 show that a white dot just inside the dust ring moved in the intervening two years. Researchers believe the dot is a planet that weighs no more than 3 Jupiter masses and lies about three times as far from its star as Pluto does from the Sun (Courtesy of Paul Kalas/UC Berkeley)

–

Yet another fantastic finding was the discovery of a planetary trio orbiting the star HR 8799 in the constellation pegasus. About 130 light years away, the planets found are from 7-10 times the size of jovian Jupiter. With the farthest of the lot sitting at a distance of 68 AU from HR 8799 (1 AU is the distance between the earth and the Sun). These planets are still glowing because of the heat resulting from contraction after their formation. Their orbit was measured by far IR techniques at the Keck and Gemini North telescopes in Hawaii.

This near-infrared composite image shows the nearby star HR 8799 (multi-coloured blob) and its three planets (red dots at upper left, upper right and just below the star). The planets are 7 to 10 times as massive as Jupiter (Image: National Research Council Canada).

–

Wow! I am awed once again by the ability of astronomers to find out even the most obscure of dots amongst a nasty conundrum of dots. And even more by the discovery itself. And let me not talk about the images we have above.

I have always harbored a fantasy, that is to be on the crew of humans who get to travel to such a far off land on a Super Daedalus or Super Orion type space-ship. It would take some years (space-ship time). But ofcourse when I return to Earth I would not find anybody I know. For, centuries would have passed as per Earth time by the time I get back. ;)

–

Onrionesque Reality Home >>

Check out the video for more info.

Hubble captures first visible image of an extra solar planet

Update:  I originally misspelled this is as “Formalhaut,” a mistake I’ve been making ever since I was a kid and always forget.

Artist’s concept of the star Fomalhaut and the Jupiter-type planet that the Hubble Space Telescope observed. A ring of debris appears to surround Fomalhaut as well. The planet, called Fomalhaut b, orbits the 200-million-year-old star every 872 years. Credit: ESA, NASA, and L. Calcada (ESO for STScI)

Estimated to be no more than three times Jupiter’s mass, the planet, called Fomalhaut b, orbits the bright southern star Fomalhaut, located 25 light-years away in the constellation Piscis Australis, or the “Southern Fish.”

This visible-light image from the Hubble shows the newly discovered planet, Fomalhaut b, orbiting its parent star.

The planet is brighter than expected for an object of three Jupiter masses. One possibility is that it has a Saturn-like ring of ice and dust reflecting starlight. The ring might eventually coalesce to form moons. The ring’s estimated size is comparable to the region around Jupiter and its four largest orbiting satellites.

Future observations will attempt to see the planet in infrared light and will look for evidence of water vapor clouds in the atmosphere. This would yield clues to the evolution of a comparatively newborn 100-million-year-old planet. Astrometric measurements of the planet’s orbit will provide enough precision to yield an accurate mass.

Meet Fomalhaut b a new planet outside of our solar system. It orbits the star Fomalhaut, of course.

Earlier today I was reminded of who has the coolest media relations job in Washington, D.C., if not the world, when I read that NASA had announced that the Hubble Space Telescope had captured the first image of a planet circling another star. In fact, according to the AP, NASA has now captured images of four planets, three of them orbiting the same star, and the fourth circling a different star.

So in my job, I speak to journalists about cell phones and FCC actions. That’s pretty cool, but I don’t get to issue news releases announcing groundbreaking discoveries from space.

So today I’m announcing I’m officially jealous of someone named J.D. Harrington, the NASA spokesperson whose name was on today’s news release.

One of the planets was found orbiting the star Fomalhaut, around 25 light-years from Earth.

Photo courtesy of Discovermagazine.com’s Bad Astronomy Blog.

This is a true “Holy shit!” moment. So far, the only planets we’ve found by direct imaging have either been too large to be properly classified as planets, or they haven’t been orbiting actual stars. In short, this is monumental.

It gets better. Much better. The Keck/Gemini observatory gives us this image of the star HR 8799.

Your eyes do not decieve. What you are looking at is two (TWO!!!) planets orbiting HR 8799. Apparently, they saw a third one, too, but I’m too busy picking my jaw up off the floor to go hunting for images.

I am actually too shocked and giddy to write anything useful. Sometimes, the universe sees fit to remind me why I became a science nerd in the first place.

You can read more about both planetary systems here and get the juicy details about the one orbiting HR 8799 here.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go wipe the drool off my face. And pick my jaw up off the floor.

(NOTE: This seems to me like a pretty good reason to either maintain or replace Hubble. That, and the mystery object it found a couple of months ago)

My First Post here was an image from the Hubble Space Telescope, which happens to be on of my favorite sources of images.
Title:

Debris Ring Around a Star

Image:

Description:

NASA Hubble Space Telescope’s most detailed visible-light image ever taken of a narrow, dusty ring around the nearby star Fomalhaut (HD 216956), offers the strongest evidence yet that an unruly and unseen planet may be gravitationally tugging on the ring.

Hubble unequivocally shows that the center of the ring is a whopping 1.4 billion miles (15 astronomical units) away from the star. This is a distance equal to nearly halfway across our solar system. The most plausible explanation, astronomers said, is that an unseen planet moving in an elliptical orbit is reshaping the ring with its gravitational pull. The geometrically striking ring, tilted obliquely toward Earth, would not have such a great offset if it were simply being influenced by Fomalhaut’s gravity alone.

An offset of the ring center from the star has been inferred from previous and longer wavelength observations using submillimeter telescopes on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, the Spitzer Space Telescope, Caltech’s Submillimeter Observatory and applying theoretical modeling and physical assumptions. Now Hubble’s sharp images directly reveal the ring’s offset from Fomalhaut.

These new observations provide strong evidence that at least one unseen planetary mass object is orbiting the star. Hubble would have detected an object larger than a planet, such as a brown dwarf. “Our new Hubble images confirm those earlier hypotheses that proposed a planet was perturbing the ring,” said Paul Kalas of the University of California at Berkeley. The ring is similar to our solar system’s Kuiper Belt, a vast reservoir of icy material left over from the formation of our solar system planets.

The observations offer insights into our solar system’s formative years, when the planets played a game of demolition derby with the debris left over from the formation of our planets, gravitationally scattering many objects across space. Some icy material may have collided with the inner solar system planets, irrigating them with water formed in the colder outer solar system. Other debris may have traveled outward, forming the Kuiper Belt and the Oort Cloud, a spherical cloud of material surrounding the solar system.

Only Hubble has the exquisite optical resolution to resolve that the ring’s inner edge is sharper than its outer edge, a telltale sign that an object is gravitationally sweeping out material like a plow clearing away snow. Another classic signature of a planet’s influence is the ring’s relatively narrow width, about 2.3 billion miles (25 astronomical units). Without an object to gravitationally keep the ring material intact, astronomers said, the particles would spread out much wider.

“What we see in this ring is similar to what is seen in the Cassini spacecraft images of Saturn’s narrow rings. In those images, Saturn’s moons are ‘shepherding’ the ring material and keeping the ring from spreading out,” Kalas said.

The suspected planet may be orbiting far away from Fomalhaut, inside the dust ring’s inner edge, between 4.7 billion and 6.5 billion miles (50 to 70 astronomical units) from the star. The ring is 12 billion miles (133 astronomical units) from Fomalhaut, which is much farther away than our outermost planet Pluto is from the Sun. These Hubble observations do not detect the putative planet directly, so the astronomers cannot measure its mass. They will, instead, conduct computer simulations of the ring’s dynamics to estimate the planet’s mass.

Kalas and collaborators James R. Graham of the University of California at Berkeley and Mark Clampin of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., will publish their findings in the June 23, 2005 issue of the journal Nature.

Fomalhaut, a 200-million-year-old star, is a mere infant compared to our own 4.5-billion-year-old Sun. It resides 25 light-years away from the Sun. Located in the constellation Piscis Austrinus (the Southern Fish), the Fomalhaut ring is ten times as old as debris disks seen previously around the stars AU Microscopii and Beta Pictoris, where planets may still be forming. If our solar system is any example, planets should have formed around Fomalhaut within tens of millions of years after the birth of the star.

The Hubble images also provide a glimpse of the outer planetary region surrounding a star other than our Sun. Many of the more than 100 planets detected beyond our solar system are orbiting close to their stars. Most of the current planet-detecting techniques favor finding planets that are close to their stars.

“The size of Fomalhaut’s dust ring suggests that not all planetary systems form and evolve in the same way — planetary architectures can be quite different from star to star,” Kalas explained. “While Fomalhaut’s ring is analogous to the Kuiper Belt, its diameter is four times greater than that of the Kuiper Belt.”

The astronomers used the Advanced Camera for Surveys’ (ACS) coronagraph aboard Hubble to block out the light from the bright star so they could see details in the faint ring.

“The ACS’s coronagraph offers high contrast, allowing us to see the ring’s structure against the extremely bright glare from Fomalhaut,” Clampin said. “This observation is currently impossible to do at visible wavelengths without the Hubble Space Telescope. The fact that we were able to detect it with Hubble was unexpected, but impressive.”

Kalas and his collaborators used Hubble over a five-month period in 2004 — May 17, Aug. 2, and Oct. 27 — to map the ring’s structure. One side of the ring has yet to be imaged because it extended beyond the ACS camera’s field of view. The astronomers will use Hubble again this summer to map the entire ring. They expect that the additional Hubble data will reveal whether or not the ring has any gaps, which could have been carved out by the gravitational influence of an unseen body. The longer, deeper exposures also may show whether the ring has an even wider diameter than currently seen. In addition, the astronomers will measure the ring’s colors to determine its physical properties, including its composition.

Previous thermal emission maps of Fomalhaut showed that one side of the ring is warmer than the other side, implying that the ring is off center by about half the distance measured by Hubble. This difference might be explained by the fact that Hubble’s ACS images of the ring’s structure are 100 times sharper than the longer wavelength observations, and hence, yield a much more accurate result. Or the discrepancy might imply that the ring’s size looks different at other wavelengths.

Fomalhaut’s dust ring was discovered in 1983 in observations made by NASA’s Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS). The system is a compelling target for future telescopes such as the James Webb Space Telescope and the Terrestrial Planet Finder, Kalas said

Credit:

NASA,ESA, P. Kalas and J. Graham (University of California, Berkeley), and M. Clampin (NASA‘s Goddard Space Flight Center)

Credit:

National Institutes of Science and NASA

Description:

A young star’s strange elliptical ring of dust likely heralds the presence of an undiscovered Neptune-sized planet, says a University of Rochester astronomer in the latest Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Stars in the early stages of life are surrounded by dust clouds that thin out and dissipate as the star reaches maturity, becoming rings in their final stages. One star, however, has a dust ring that has long puzzled astronomers because it is not centered around the star as usual. Instead, the ring is elliptical, with the parent star off to one side.

“We wanted to know why this ring was off-center,” says Alice C. Quillen, Associate Professor of Astronomy and author of the study. “People guessed there might be a planet in there, but nobody knew where it might be, or how big it might be. Now we’ve got a very good idea.”

Roughly 250 planets have been discovered so far around stars other than our Sun. Most have been revealed by the way the planets influence their parent stars, but Quillen has been working for years on understanding the delicate interaction between stellar dust disks and the planets that shape them. She is now one of the world’s experts in predicting planet size and position from the features of a star’s dust ring.

Quillen used new images from the Hubble Space Telescope that caught the star, Fomalhaut, and its surrounding ring almost edge-on and in more detail than ever before. Fomalhaut, 25 light-years away, is the brightest star in the autumn sky. Using a device called a coronagraph that blocks out a star’s light so dimmer objects near it can be seen, the Hubble revealed that Fomalhaut was indeed off-center within its ring. The images were also clear enough to show that the ring itself had a surprisingly sharp edge.

That sharp edge was the clue Quillen was looking for. Since ascertaining one of the first extra-solar planets using dust-ring analysis in 2002, Quillen has greatly strengthened her planet-ring interaction models. Treating the ring like a hydrodynamic structure, for instance, is necessary for younger stars whose dust is relatively fine and acts more like a fluid—while the physics of dust collision become dominant in older ring systems where the dust has begun clumping into larger bodies.

The sharp inside edge of Fomalhaut, Quillen calculated, demanded that a relatively small, Neptune-size planet was tucked right up against the inner side of the ring, using its gravity to toss dust in the area out of orbit.

According to Quillen’s calculations, the ring is elliptical because the Neptunian planet’s own orbit around Fomalhaut is elliptical—a curiosity in such a young system. When stars form from a giant cloud of gas and dust, the angular momentum of the cloud carries over to all the objects that form from the cloud, including new planets. Those new planets should, initially at least, orbit in nice, circular paths—not elliptical ones. Fomalhaut’s ring is offset by 1.4 billion miles, more than 15 times the distance from the Earth to the Sun, suggesting the hidden planet’s orbit is also tremendously skewed.

“Something had to skew that planet, and that’s what we’re working on now,” says Quillen. “There may have been fantastic planetary collisions early on that changed their orbits. We’re working on figuring out how many more planets of what size you’d need to account for that elliptical orbit, and to account for why there is no other dust inside that ring.”

Quillen’s model will remain just a theory until a new generation of telescopes can actually see the Formalhaut planets in question. These telescopes will be equipped with sophisticated coronagraphs that can block out Formalhaut’s light enough to let the planets themselves shine through.