ON A SPECIAL DISCOVERY IN SPACE

WAY OUT THERE

My attention was drawn by one of the most mesmerizing space pictures I've seen, but the article it illustrates is also worth some focus.  As the New York Times piece goes on to describe, the picture shows one of the first glimpses of extrasolar planets:

In what might amount to an early Christmas present to the universe, two groups of astronomers have taken the first pictures of what they say — and other astronomers agree — are probably planets going around other stars.

The achievement, the result of years of effort on improved observational techniques and better data analysis, presages more such discoveries, the experts said, and will open the door to new investigations and discoveries of what planets are and how they came to be formed..."

“It’s the tip of iceberg. Now that we know they are there, there is going to be an explosion,” said Christian Marois of the Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics in Victoria, British Columbia. Dr. Marois is the leader of a team that recorded three planets circling a star — known as HR 8799 — 130 light-years away in the constellation Pegasus.

The other team, led by Paul Kalas of the University of California, Berkeley, found a planet orbiting the star Fomalhaut, only 25 light-years from Earth, in the constellation Piscis Austrinus."

The scale of what we're talking about is breath-taking.

The Fomalhaut planet is about three times as massive as Jupiter, according to Dr. Kalas’s calculations, and is on the inner edge of a huge band of dust, taking roughly 872 years to complete a revolution of its star.

Both systems appear to be scaled-up versions of our own solar system, with giant planets in the outer reaches, leaving plenty of room for smaller planets to lurk undetectable in the warmer inner regions. Dust rings lie even farther out, like the Kuiper belt of icy debris extending beyond the orbit of Neptune in our own solar system.

“This is a window into what our own solar system might have looked like when it was 60 million years old,” Dr. Marois said."

It's pretty special stuff, and the article also has some multimedia elements worth exploring if this news is your cup of tea.

Comments

[Alex Tolley]

It is amazing that planets are finally being imaged, hot on the heels of being able to detect earth sized planets via transits.

With imaging we can do spectroscopy which means that we will be able to detect life bearing planets within a decade.