First Ever Image of a Multi-Planet System Around a Sun-Like Star (2020) | Hacker News Reader

First Ever Image of a Multi-Planet System Around a Sun-Like Star (2020)

eso.org

161 pointsechelon41 comments

PSA: Click the image to see the full images. There are four images in total.

I wonder why they show a cropped photo in the article.

I don't think there are more than 2 exoplanets pictured:

"The two planets are visible as two bright dots in the centre (TYC 8998-760-1b) and bottom right (TYC 8998-760-1c) of the frame. Other bright dots, which are background stars, are visible in the image as well. By taking different images at different times, the team were able to distinguish these planets from the background stars. "

I meant four pictures. I've edited my post to clear that up (hopefully). Thanks!

Naive question here, but how much more resolution can we ever expect to get out of pictures like these? If it gets 100 times better will we be able see what the planets look like?

You may be interested in:

Direct Multipixel Imaging and Spectroscopy of an Exoplanet with a Solar Gravity Lens Mission

https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.08421

...and an excellent video someone made about that paper:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQFqDKRAROI

I am interested in that. Thanks for sharing!

That is a really interesting video!

That was fascinating. I guess problems of scarcity / economics mean we can't just launch a spherical shell of satellites into the 500ish AU orbit of the sun, not to mention the data retention requirements but man that would be even more awesome just to be able to synthesize an image at any point in the 100ly range... One can only dream I guess, but even just a single image of a single planet's surface would blow everyone's mind I think, so string of pearls it is! Please happen.

That's probably a decent next step, I'd estimate two decades, after the James Webb telescope going online soon. Hoping for a good launch.

Oh don't remind me of JWT. I'm actively pretending it doesn't exist until it gets results because if anything happens, I mean there's different degrees of disaster but in terms of... you know let's just pretend we never mentioned it.

"just don't think about it, Morty"

We better hurry that up. 500 AU is 3.5 times more than Voyagers currently made, and it took them 40+ years to get there. It would be interesting to fiddle with fuel/payload/acceleration/speed metrics with LEO [re]fuel.

At ~14:20 in the video they start describing the solar sails that get the spacecraft up to 22 AU/year in velocity, passing Pluto's orbit in 2 years (230,000 miles/hour or 105,000 m/s or 0.035%*c).

Note that in these images, the planets are unresolved. They are point sources. Point sources span multiple pixels due to the sampling theorem.

Suprisingly you can get alot of information from a system, that seems "lost" at first.

https://www.csail.mit.edu/news/imaging-method-uses-shadows-r...

The problem here is the complexity of the room in between and the background. As in- light deformed by gravity lenses etc. - but in theory alot more can be extracted from the "noise" in the neighbouring pixels.

If I have learned correctly by watching police procedurals on television, it's simple a matter of verbalizing the mystical incantation "zoom. enhance." and typing rabidly on a keyboard and within second you'll be able to see the make of the watch on an alien's left tentacle.

Is it not just that easy?

Amazing. Can't wait to see what the James Webb launch is going to show us.

I wonder how they prioritize time? There's going to be a huge backlog of people wanting to re-image everything, the decision making procedure must be stressful.

First round has already been awarded: https://www.stsci.edu/jwst/science-execution/approved-progra...

Awesome, thanks! First up (if I'm reading this correctly, ID#1424):

Principal Investigator: Leigh Fletcher

PI Institution: University of Leicester

Title: Extreme Events on Gas Giants: Impacts and Storm Eruptions

Allocation: 10.4 hours allocation change history

I bet those 10.4 hours are planned down to the millisecond.

I'm surprised that is the first priority. It presumably targets Jupiter and Saturn: I thought the JWT was primarily for observing objects further afield.

Sure, there's a ton we don't know yet about Jupiter and Saturn...but for reference Juno cost 0.1x the amount of the JWT and observed Jupiter from one million times closer [0]. Is the JWT really the most economical way to make these observations?

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juno_(spacecraft)

Maybe they're starting with an easier goal and then work their way up from there? Maybe that allows the scientists to calibrate the instruments or whatever

I don't know the first thing about how any of this works, but that would be my first guess.

Got to dial in those instruments some how. Might as well be something large and easy to find.

And this is the program that will study this system: https://www.stsci.edu/jwst/science-execution/program-informa...

Do the researchers pay to use the telescope or how does this work?

> Do the researchers pay to use the telescope or how does this work?

In general, these types of flagship facilities (JWST, Hubble, etc.) are funded by the government (via NASA in the US). In some cases, larger ground-based observatories (e.g., Keck, Large Binocular Telescope) are funded by a combination of private consortia (consisting of foundations and public/private universities) and competitively awarded scientific grants (e.g., from the National Science Foundation, in the US).

The operations are generally paid for by the above sources. Researchers apply for time through a competitive proposal process where ideas for using the facility are collected and evaluated, with proposals awarded telescope time based on scientific merit and technical feasibility. Sometimes, particularly for investigators located in the US working with space telescope data, funding is awarded to the investigating team along with the telescope time. This funding is used to support the analysis of the collected data (e.g., to hire faculty/postdoctoral researchers/students, purchase computers, etc.). For ground-based facilities, researchers often apply for funding from the National Science Foundation to support the analysis of their data.

Indeed, they must know already what will be imaged first. It would make sense to look at something Hubble has already studied in detail - both for calibration but also to understand the differences in the data outputs. So it might be an updated version of an iconic Hubble shot. It would be a nice victory lap for the team to see those comparisons.

I'm nervous just thinking about getting to that first operation and the crazy set of steps that need to be perfect on the way.

Do we get spectroscopy from these images? What are the chances we could get detailed information about the atmospheres of earth-like exoplanets at some point in the future?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TYC_8998-760-1 cites a paper with spectroscopy results.

> TYC 8998-760-1 b is a gas giant exoplanet which has a mass 14 times that of Jupiter, and a radius of 3 RJ. It orbits at a distance of 162 AU (2.42×1010 km; 1.51×1010 mi), or slightly more than 5 times the Neptune-Sun distance.[5][7] In July 2021, astronomers reported the detection, for the first time, of an isotope in the atmosphere of an exoplanet; more specifically, the isotope Carbon-13 (C13) was found in the atmosphere.[8][9]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-76b

Though it's not Earth-like, we have already got some data on exoplanets using spectroscopy.

I wonder if they’re looking back.

Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23917559

After the VLT comes the ELT. I wonder what superlatives will need to be used for other future telescopes.

The OWT was proposed, but not funded. Yet.

"Overwhelmingly Large Telescope": https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overwhelmingly_Large_Telesco...

The GBT monster, the king of the telescopes at the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia -- I always think of it as the "Great Big Telescope": https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Bank_Telescope

A radio telescopes, sure, like the Very Large Array... but the next such instrument up is simply the "Square Kilometer Array", reflecting (!) the total area of all if the array elements.

(I lobbied for naming it the SRSLY, but these international consortiums can be a tough audience to calibrate; they were sick of me by the end of the conference.)

SRSLY isn't as far of an outlier as any of the other names. What was your name spelled out meant to be?

We need Douglas Adams to name a few of these.

It was awful: "Space-Radio Synthesis [with a] Large 'Y'" or some such.

And then, the SKA was split in two: half in Australia, and half in South Africa.

So it didn't hold up at all, but at the time, it was fun.

I could name a few:

BBT - big beautiful telescope

SHT - seriously humongous telescope

WTF - wide-aperture telescope fleet

BFT 9000?

Really showing my ignorance here, but it took me a while before realizing that the rarity/news worthy aspect was multiple planets around one star. I never considered our solar system being such an outlier.

In retrospect it's of course very clear from the headline itself.

Ours probably isn't, it's just that for a long time we lacked the means to detect planets around other suns; it's only in recent decades that we have started to map exoplanets, often based on tiny wobbles of stars (gravity) and tiny dimming of stars (planets passing in front of them). But they are now able to capture some images from those planets. I wonder if the Webb telescope can do that as well.

first ever image of a multi planet system... taken from Earth

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