A 12-year sequence of telescope images of a star and four planets orbiting (bsky.app)
104 points by mariuz 10 hours ago
7373737373 an hour ago
Also check out the Simulated Observation of the Solar System by the Habitable Worlds Observatory (under "Videos"), expected to be launched in the 2040s, the first to be able to detect Earth-like planets around Sun-like stars! https://habitableworldsobservatory.org/multimedia
DrBecky's video on it: https://youtube.com/watch?v=z2JIkAPcdnU
bananzamba 26 minutes ago
There are many more of these : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_directly_imaged_exopla...
arlattimore 26 minutes ago
Space and the enormity of it breaks your mind when you start thinking about it.
The star in the middle of the animation, is approximately 20AU (Astronomical Units) in size looking at the scale line. 20AU is approximately 1.8b miles/3b kilometres or approximately the distance from the Sun to Uranus.
If Google's correct, if everyone on Earth lived on that star - each and every one of us could have a backyard larger than the surface area of Earth ;p
kridsdale3 10 minutes ago
I don't think you should infer the radius of the star from the blacked out region. I think they just do that because the luminosity of the star is so intense it would blow away the sensitivity needed to see the planets. So they set everything to zero for a certain zone on the lens/sensor. It's not the physical surface of the star.
tocs3 7 hours ago
Amazing. Scrolling down one of the comments has an animation of starts around the center of the Milky Way. I have seen a few short ones of nebulae. There should be much much more of this sort of thing.
I appreciate that scientist are not always after the pretty pictures. They can be expensive, do not always give the data needed, and the experiments do not always produce data that has obvious pretty picture potential. Still, for the average non professional scientist (me) the pictures are about all I will ever get out of the science.
turtletontine 2 hours ago
The galactic center data actually proved there was a supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, and weighed it precisely from those stars motions. The name of the account that posted that animation (Sagittarius A*) is the name of that supermassive black hole.
This work earned the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2020/summary/
swiftcoder 2 hours ago
A good chunk of science communication centres around how one conveys the wow factor to folks who aren't already obsessed with the particular field. Images like this really help sell it to the rest of us
Kaxo 2 hours ago
The noise from the blocked-out star noticably decreases in 2017. Is that due to changes in the stars' activity cycle, or is that due to better processing/capture technology?
rietta an hour ago
I do not know, but my best guess would be an improved post processing algorithm was introduced.
ajcp an hour ago
I believe it's because the star's brightness does fluctuate, so activity cycle based?
Juvination 44 minutes ago
What are the odds of there being smaller exoplanets that are effectively being outshone by the others? Since each one these is more massive than Jupitar.
317070 2 hours ago
Wow, in terms of angle, how far are these planets separated from the star?
I always thought we would never be able to image something like that. The distances would be too small and the contrast too large to figure something at the resolution we can get on earth. I'll need to read up on how this was done.
turtletontine 2 hours ago
The scale bar (20 AU) represents 20 time the distance between the Earth and the sun. This star is about 41 parsecs away, so the angular size of that scale bar is about half an arcsec. (One degree is split into 60 arcminutes, one arcminute into 60 arcseconds. Just like a clock).
That angle is about the diameter of a US quarter coin seen from 11km (7mi) away.
ceejayoz 2 hours ago
ryandrake 2 hours ago
Yea, the planets are gigantic, and in distant orbits from their star. I don't think we even have the ability yet to directly image exoplanets much smaller than, say, Saturn, or closer to their stars than Saturn.
jcims 2 hours ago
TL;DR - Two inside (16, 26AU) and two outside (43, 69AU) Pluto's orbit (39AU). They are all estimated to be a bit bigger than Jupiter.
Sarkie an hour ago
They need to remove that one frame
sixothree an hour ago
When my mother was born, plate tectonics was a hypothesis. When I was born we didn't know for certain if planets existed outside of our solar system.
forinti an hour ago
When my grandparents were born, we didn't know there were other galaxies.
mmooss an hour ago
From ~0:04 - 0:05, two dots at ~10 and 8 o'clock fade in and out simultaneously, with roughly the size and brightness of the planets. They peak at observation ~2016-07-06. Any idea what they are?
Their balanced position and simultaneous changes make them seem like an artifact of the imaging.