Hidden Planet Discovered in Old Hubble Data

mercurial

mercurial

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A new technique has uncovered an extrasolar planet hidden in Hubble Space Telescope images taken 11 years ago.

The new strategy may allow researchers to uncover other distant alien worlds potentially lurking in over a decade's worth of Hubble archival data.

The method was used to find an exoplanet that went undetected in Hubble images taken in 1998 with its Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS).

Astronomers knew of the planet's existence from images taken with the Keck and Gemini North telescopes in 2007 and 2008, long after Hubble snapped its first picture of the system.

The planet is estimated to be at least seven times the mass of Jupiter. It is the outermost of three massive planets known to orbit the dusty young star HR 8799, which is 130 light-years away from Earth.

NICMOS could not see the other two planets because its coronagraphic spot — a device that blots out the glare of the star —blocked its view of the two inner planets.

"We've shown that NICMOS is more powerful than previously thought for imaging planets," said the scientist who found the planet, David Lafreniere of the University of Toronto in Canada. "Our new image-processing technique efficiently subtracts the glare from a star that spills over the coronagraph's edge, allowing us to see planets that are one-tenth the brightness of what could be detected before with Hubble."

Taking the image of an exoplanet is not an easy task. Planets can be billions of times fainter than the star around which they orbit and are typically located at separations smaller than 1/2,000th the apparent size of the full moon, as seen from Earth, from their star.

The planet recovered in the NICMOS data is about 100,000 times fainter than the star when viewed in the near-infrared spectrum.

Over the last two decades, scientists have spotted more than 300 extrasolar planets circling other stars in our Milky Way galaxy.
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I wonder how many other planets have gone unnoticed...
 
Why still bother looking for other planets. It's not as if we can do anything about it.

What we can do something about is getting into space and currently r&d is being done in the wrong areas.
 
Because in future we may be able to reach those planets, which may be crucial for the survival of our species...
Besides, how do we know anything? I mean, for all we know, we already have the technology but it's being kept secret...
 
mercurial said:
Because in future we may be able to reach those planets, which may be crucial for the survival of our species...
Besides, how do we know anything? I mean, for all we know, we already have the technology but it's being kept secret...
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I would be pissed off if that was true >:[
 
Maybe they are already colonising other planets with all the people who go missing every year........woaaaaaah.......
 
Searching for other planets and finding them will change our entire perspective on our place in the universe. Imagine if another earth is found 'nearby'. We could try to communicate with possible life there and the reply could come back with 2 or 3 decades or so?

Besides, searching for planets isn't relatively costly, so I don't see why it is a waste of resources.
 
The fact of the matter is that we cannot rely on one planet to survive on. Earth will perish one day, so we need to transport our species to another planet or planets. What I would like to see is even if we do get to move to another planet, if and how they will transport animals to there as well...
 
mercurial said:
The fact of the matter is that we cannot rely on one planet to survive on. Earth will perish one day, so we need to transport our species to another planet or planets. What I would like to see is even if we do get to move to another planet, if and how they will transport animals to there as well...
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I hope they leave the bloddy mosquitoes here.
 
mercurial said:
Because in future we may be able to reach those planets, which may be crucial for the survival of our species...
Besides, how do we know anything? I mean, for all we know, we already have the technology but it's being kept secret...
Click to expand...

What I mean is; first develop the technology to get us into space with relative ease and then they can go look for planets.
 
Picard said:
What I mean is; first develop the technology to get us into space with relative ease and then they can go look for planets.
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And like I said - for all we know, it might already exist. I also don't get why they would be searching for places so far away that we may never reach. I think they are hiding some technology from us...
 
The reason for searching for exoplanets is to further the understanding of the universe and planet formation. Before it was thought that planets where extremely rare, now it seems they are all over the place. Now they need to find Earth-like planets to see how prevalent these are.
 
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