Never-Before-Seen Alien Planet Imaged Directly in New Photo | Hacker News Reader

Never-Before-Seen Alien Planet Imaged Directly in New Photo

space.com

82 pointsobeone40 comments

Images like this never got me excited about space as a kid. But I remember the first time I saw the images from Pathfinder, and it blew my mind:

http://www-k12.atmos.washington.edu/k12/mars/nasa_jpl_mpf_pi...

It's very weird, because on the face of it, it just looks like desert. But then you remember you are looking at the surface of a totally different planet.

This doesn't leave you awestruck? http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/0803/lh95_hst_big.jpg

I remember looking at that picture a while ago and thinking that it sucks that we'll never get to visit any of those million/billion/unlimited planets. Maybe in 1000 years they will be able to jump between planets with ease, but I don't think anyone alive today will ever be able to set foot on anything except Earth, the Moon, and Mars.

I think the point is that, as a kid, no. Because children are still developing their abstract thinking skills, stars are just pretty lights.

They might "know" that stars are other suns with other planets, but they have even more trouble truly grasping that than you or I- and even I struggle sometimes to "see" the planets and suns amongst the twinkly lights.

Honestly? No. It doesn't. It's very pretty, but it's very abstract. The fact that hidden in there somewhere is a planet very similar to the one I know and love isn't apparent. Yes, I am capable of imagining such things, but it's a pipe dream compared to actual photos of a real landing.

I might be wrong, but I don't think those are individual planets. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but all of those represent solar systems, and that means that each one has the possibility to have at least one planet orbiting it with conditions similar to Earth.

Yes, it's a pipe dream, but 150 years ago, so was a metal vehicle (of weight ranging from 50 pounds to hundreds of tons) that can go 100 MPH by filling it up with oil/coal/hydrogen/corn juice/electricity, or bombs that can go to the other side of the planet and detonate with a force destructive enough to melt large cities instantly.

Instant learning requires pretty abstract thinking but it's being done today.

We're just beginning to under the basics of quantum physics, who knows what possibilities that field will open up.

Nanobots and terminator style machines are pretty close to being reality.

Artificial intelligence (and whatever awesome abilities come with that) is almost a reality.

Our current and incomplete understanding of physics (and quantum physics) only SUGGEST that we absolutely can't jump between stars with ease, so it might not be 100% a pipe-dream.

Holy bad user interface Batman! Here's a direct link to the picture.

The planet is the blue dot on the bottom left. They removed the light from this star, which is the photoshopped "star" in the middle.

http://i.space.com/images/i/000/029/551/original/exoplanet-h...

it's sad to see the kind of Ads science sites have to show.

space.com is particularly cheesy in this regard. I stopped visiting voluntarily (sometimes I get click jacked there)

Don't blame the mirror :) The ads shown may be the ads placed through exchange where they were targeted based on profile you matched. For example, checking some HDD prices, i see HDD ads everywhere the few days following it.

That is true of course. I don't dislike advertising, just like I don't dislike paying for dinner. However I see it as a economic thing, rather than charge money for their articles they charge 'eyeballs' (so that the advertiser picks up the tab) and the better the content the more I'll put up with that (case in point watching things on Hulu where you get forced to watch ads) but at some point the 'cost' of the ads, the in your face pop-ups, the mouse over talking heads, the slide on banner, the pop under or over banner, it costs 'more' than its 'worth' for me to read it. I determined after reading space.com a lot how much ad I was willing to put up with in order to read their content, and rather than pirate it (or subvert their intent) I just stopped viewing it allowing them to spend their server resources on showing ads to people for whom its worth it to get to the content.

I don't see adds on science.com thanks to AddBlock. I'm guessing this is what makes the UI work for fine for me.

Ad-blocking on the internet is kind of like recycling. Sure, it doesn't matter if you do it, but if everyone did it we'd all be fucked.

Do you mean kind of like the inverse of recycling, or does recycling have some dark secret that I'm blissfully unaware of?

There is some conspiracy theory that recycling is actually a lie and is somehow more environmentally harmful than regular garbage. This is based on... well I don't know who comes up with this crazy shit really.

Or there's (some) Libertarians who think recycling is anti-free-market. Rand must've hated separating her trash or something.

Well, the Internet would certainly be a very different place if everybody blocked ads. It's hard to predict who would benefit and who would suffer, but "we'd all be fucked" doesn't seem like a likely scenario.

Go to the original ESO page instead of this retread teeming with hideous advertisements:

http://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1324/

I'm curious how close we are to being able to image planets to detect unnatural light. Searching for alien light pollution from planets found by Kepler would be pretty neat.

I once listened to a lecture/book from Neil deGrasse Tyson and he mentioned that for distanced over 500 lightyears, it is pretty much impossible to see any kind of artificial light from a planet. The telescope would have to be kilometers in diameter. I think the main problem is the local star and its brightness.

Interesting question regarding telescope limits: http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/17881/is-there-a-...

Is building a Kilometer sized telescopes really that difficult? What about a formation of satellites.

Impossible is a pretty strong word to use for something that is possible but economically infeasible given current technology. I'd be curious to NDT reasoning on the subject.

There have been a bunch of proposals for telescope satellite arrays and there are a few in progress like ARReST at Caltech & Surrey (which uses cube sats)

The Hubble orbits at about 600km. Getting something many km in size to orbit the earth properly might be difficult.

... we already do. It's called radio :)

Okay I'm trying to understand exactly what we're looking at. So apparently the star has been blacked out in order to see the exoplanet which is on the lower left. It says here that the blue circle is the size of Neptune's orbit around the sun:

http://www.eso.org/public/images/eso1324a/

But how big is the star in relation to this? Is the star the size of the blue circle or is it smaller like the size of the white flash shape in the middle? If it's the size of the blue circle, that's a REALLY close orbit for a planet. If the star is the size of the white flash shape in the middle, that makes more sense, except that the star looks almost the same size as the planet.

I would imagine that both the star and the planet if actually shown properly 'to scale' in the image would be tiny pin pricks. What you would see if you were 'standing there' is quite different to what you see in the image.

The fact that the planet and star appear much larger is probably caused by a few factors - firstly the planet is probably only taking up a few pixels on the telescopes CCD - The image has been enlarged and post processed.

Secondly the telescope will be affected by diffraction which means you will not get a proper single tiny point of light and instead will get something like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Airy-pattern.svg

Finally you need to deal with all the air that the light has to travel through before hitting the telescopes CCD - this will distort the final image, like looking at the bottom of a pond through ripples.

I wonder if anyone ever peers back at us as intensely as we peer out.

It seems unlikely that they would be peering in a way we would expect, considering that out of the billion-year history of life on a given planet, 100 years ago we weren't looking at all and 100 years from now we may be looking in entirely new ways.

I think "a way we would expect" would be kind of precluded by the fact that, if something were looking back, it probably would've had to develop or evolve some sort of perception/method of observation that we don't have access to, otherwise we'd have a much easier time accomplishing said feat. :)

That's true. I've never considered that before.

What limits space photography? I just realized I know nothing about digital photography either...

I've pondered this many times. My conclusion is that it took billions of years for a planet to get to a point for sustainable life, and then billions more to get where we are and considering we've only been here for a blink of an eye. There may be other areas of life but they are so far flung across the known universe we're not going to discover each other anytime soon.

It would be like a colony of ants in San Francisco looking for others but the nearest one is in Paris.

If those ants spent centuries or millennia building giant machines that could see Paris from San Francisco, they'll eventually succeed in making contact. Additionally, if anyone in Paris is looking, the ants in SF have made quite the attention-grabbing scene thus increasing the odds of being contacted. This also makes it seem likely that we'll never find living aliens, but will find plenty of million-year-old machines.

The problem is centuries and millennia are but fragments of time compared to the entire life of the universe...so it's kind of like the ant analogy of a colony in San Fran looking for one in Paris, but only looking from 2:10 pm and 5 seconds to 2:10 pm and 5.1 seconds. Even less than that, probably.

Us in particular, or just in our direction?

If you mean us in particular- doubtful. Hell, out of all the stars in the sky, I can name maybe two? Three?

If you mean in our direction, that depends on whether we are part of some cool space feature, ala the Horsehead Nebula. So maybe- but I have no idea what the odds of being in a cool space feature vs. not are. Only that they are better than Sol being picked out individually.

I mean both. When we look out into space, we're not looking at/for anyone in particular. I think all features of the Universe from any perspective are by definition worth peering at. Similar to the interesting number paradox.[1] Look at the Hubble Deep Field, for example[2]; that photo was taken of an evidently starless/empty patch of sky.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interesting_number_paradox [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Deep_Field

See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Worlds_Mission a proposed $3B space-based occluder, to be used to directly image exoplanets with space-based telescopes.

I guess I'm the only one who read that as "Alien Plant" - I was excited to see that space.com was posting about alien life!

is it my eyes or the image has some filament structure?

Atmospheric distortion?

It seems that one of the "background" blobs is aligned with the exoplanet.

There's filament alright [1], but I don't think it is visible on this scale, so it is probably something else.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galactic_filament

It could also be an artifact of the image reconstruction technique. It may be able to suppress high-spatial-frequency noise (salt-and-pepper) but not low-spatial-frequency noise (for example).

Or, the algorithm may introduce artifacts due to modeling errors (say, imperfectly suppressing scattered light from the main star).

Like the structures that you see in sonograms or some CT images.

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