Where Is the Planet

whereistheplanet.com

34 points·andsoitis··3 comments

Fun. But I don't have a telescope to try those coordinates. This would be so much more interesting with just a one pager about what you are doing and maybe a pointer to public telescopes you could point. Also, whether a typical non-pro telescope could image one of these.

There's a million of us interested non-pro nerds with smart telescopes, help us understand what is in our technical imaging capabilities. So add a dropdown to filter on imaging power? My sad guess is we can't help see these possible planets, help us understand.

You can't see the directly-imaged exoplanets with amateur telescopes. Best we can do is to use the RA and DEC coordinates from this site and observe the host star/planetary system (you'll still just see the star at best).

Without going into details, basically the reason comes down to the fact they are tiny and the star is too bright in comparison. Without a coronagraph which can block the starlight even the most powerful telescopes (like JWST) we've built can't image them.

PDS 70, my beloved.

For those who don't know, only PDS 70b and c are the exoplanets directly imaged which are still embedded inside thier nascent protoplanetary disk. For most other planets, the disk gas has mostly been cleared/dissipated/accreted.

For those who are more interested you can refer to the detection papers for both:

PDS 70b: https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/pdf/2018/09/aa32957-18.pdf

PDS 70c: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-019-0780-5

Arxiv link for Nature paywall (PDS 70c): https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.01486

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