Major Breakthrough: First Photos of Planets Around Other Stars | Hacker News Reader

Major Breakthrough: First Photos of Planets Around Other Stars

space.com

96 pointsAnon8441 comments

Space.com doesn't give the photos and they don't even link to the original paper. The article mostly speculates and link to themselves. Sorry, no up.

Wired did a much better article, and shorter, with less speculation: http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/11/first-direct-im.h...

Original paper: http://tinyurl.com/6fdeu5 or http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/sci;1166585v1...

They do, but it's hard to find: http://www.space.com/php/multimedia/imagedisplay/img_display...

I remarked earlier to my flatmate how much it said about our society that this wasn't the top item on all the major news sites. At least it's the first thing on Hacker News.

I have a theory about this: Misleading headlines often make people tune actually interesting things out.

I've seen a bunch of articles before this one, with headlines that make it seem like photos have been taken of planets in other solar-systems. On closer inspection they've often turned out to be artists' impressions, computer renderings, or similar things.

The net result is that today, when I saw this article, my reaction was a mix of "didn't that happen already?" and "are they real photos?".

Your comment just made me click on this link. Thanks for clearing through the noise a bit.

It is currently #3 on news.google.com and on the front-page of nytimes.com. It's not exactly being ignored.

Now number 1 on Google News, and considering that Google News is a news aggregator, this must mean that a lot of other news sources are giving prominent coverage as well.

Scientists and engineers have long been the engine of progression for societies. I think it's a shame that people don't have more of an appreciation at the technological and scientific wonders of the modern world. But like you said "At least it's the first thing on Hacker News" :D

We don't get the credit because we're nerds; The suits will.

Suits believe they are progressing things. And the rest will always credit the nearest authoritative looking type.

Worse still, many scientist and engineers credit the suits themselves.

That's a relatively recent thing. Back in the day, engineers like Brunel were rock stars.

To my ears you're saying, "Nerds are high status; They're valued above CEOs and politicians (or historical equivalents) for most of history."

I'm saying, "Suits are overvalued. And nerds are undervalued even by themselves. That's always been true with periodic exceptions."

And I don't mean "suits" as a pejorative; I'm not using it in contempt. It's a fact that people of that class wear them.

Actually, I like wearing them.

HN isn't like any other site out there.

"Scientific truth is too beautiful to be sacrificed for the sake of light entertainment or money. Astrology is an aesthetic affront. It cheapens astronomy, like using Beethoven for commercial jingles."

- Richard Dawkins

This article made me think of another quote my old physics teacher use to quote -

"Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion"

- Democritus

What about photons?

I know you didn't quote this because of the latter part of that quote, but: I discovered Chopin by playing a song on DDR that used one of his themes. So I've always been partial to people who use grandiose things for the sake of pop. Or at the very least, I'm a bit forgiving of it.

Astrology I can't stand, though. I'd like it a lot more if people didn't actually believe in it.

Or paperback polemics for evolutionary theory, eh?

pic: http://www.space.com/php/multimedia/imagedisplay/img_display...

What kind of telescope would be necessary to actually view the details of a distant planet? Also, this seems to be the uncolored version of the pic:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:HR_8799_planetary_system_...

What kind of telescope would be necessary to actually view the details of a distant planet?

An incredibly large one. I don't have time to figure it out right now, but if anyone feels motivated then what you need to be looking at is the diffraction limit:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffraction_limit

That's the fundamental limit on how small a feature you can pick up using a telescope of a given size.

Yeah, if you mean "detail on the planet" and not just resolve the planet from its star, then it's completely infeasible. The current 30m-class telescopes that are under development (ie www.tmt.org) in combination with high-contrast adaptive optics will make it possible to see earth-size planets, if I'm not mistaken, but not to resolve detail on their surface.

If there was a habitable planet in that system with intelligent life, with the same capabilities as us, they wouldn't be able to see any of the planets in our solar system.

Why not? It seems like if we can see them they could see us - unless you just mean our planets are smaller so they'd need a better telescope than we can make?

Because we do not have any planets as huge as Formalhaut a, b and c in our solar system...

Yes, and those planets are also hotter, therefore brighter and more visible.

The sky might be full of earth-like planets, and we wouldn't know (yet).

unless... detecting star-wobble is already sensitive enough to detect earth-like mass and distance from sun?

Sorry kids, My Very Elegant Mother Just Served Us Nine Pickles is going to become merely an introduction for the book you'll have to memorize after this project is finished ;)

The planets are called a, b and c. I think we can remember that.

Did anyone ask the inhabitants whether they agree to have their information stored in our computer systems under the terms of the Data Protection and Privacy laws?

I'm no legal expert, but I'm guessing that the Universal Supreme Court will affirm that a nation doesn't have legal jurisdiction outside of its light cone.

I thought we were in their light-cone, if we can see them.

We are in the light cone of the light that they emitted several hundred years ago. The light that they are emitting "now" [1] is still a few hundred years outside of our light cone, just as they still a hundred years or more away from learning about our discovery of radio.

It's theoretically possible that they know about Earth's IP laws as of a few hundred years ago. But in Dickens' day England couldn't manage to enforce their IP laws in the United States, let alone the rest of the Milky Way.

These days I'm sure that many lawyers wouldn't hesitate to sue Pluto for misappropriating the name of a Disney character, but that news has yet to reach many of our extrasolar neighbors.

[1] Keeping in mind that, in a discussion involving relativity, you have to be very careful with the word "now".

If they don't wanna have their photos taken, they shouldn't reflect the damn photons.

Wouldn't it be interesting to have a Google Earth-like products of other planets (due to spectacular advances in imaging, of course :-) ) long before we ever have the means to travel there?

That already exists! There is a product by NASA that allows you to do that, I don't remember the name (you can see the moon, mars, mercury, etc).

This one: http://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/

Enjoy! It's really amazing

Great - thanks!

There's also Microsoft's WorldWide Telescope (Windows only): http://www.worldwidetelescope.org/Home.aspx

This is incredible. If astronomers analyse the spectra of the planets they can now image and find oxygen, methane and CO2 in certain proportions, the only conclusion will be life. Imagine if they find the spectral lines from chemicals produced by an industrial, polluting society!

If current technology had enough resolution, scientists would have scanned the planets already for oxygen, methane and water (which mixed together don't quite exist unless there's a continuous force, like life, unbalancing the physical reaction).

I realise they would have done this already if they could. I was thinking more in the medium term - the next 3-5 years?

Actually, they have. There are observations with the Spitzer space telescope infrared spectrograph of planets occulting their star, where if I'm not mistaken one could see something like methane absorption signatures of the atmosphere of the planets. That's not very surprising, since these are Jupiter-like planets and they have methane clouds in their atmosphere.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com