
Never-Before-Seen Alien Planet Imaged Directly in New Photo - obeone
http://www.space.com/21395-alien-planet-direct-image.html
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untog
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...](http://www-k12.atmos.washington.edu/k12/mars/nasa_jpl_mpf_pics.html)

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_.

~~~
dm2
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.

~~~
untog
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.

~~~
dm2
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.

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kevinconroy
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...](http://i.space.com/images/i/000/029/551/original/exoplanet-
hd-95086-b.jpg?1370033710)

~~~
gcb0
it's sad to see the kind of Ads science sites have to show.

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

~~~
green7ea
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.

~~~
ryandvm
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.

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

~~~
nikatwork
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.

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

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

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standeven
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.

~~~
deletes
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.

Similar information: [http://www.space.com/13514-alien-city-artificial-lights-
extr...](http://www.space.com/13514-alien-city-artificial-lights-
extraterrestrial-planets.html)

Interesting question regarding telescope limits:
[http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/17881/is-
there-a-...](http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/17881/is-there-a-
limit-to-the-resolving-power-of-a-mirror-telescope/18276#18276)

~~~
EthanHeilman
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.

~~~
akiselev
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)

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insickness
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.

~~~
luke_s
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.

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charonn0
I wonder if anyone ever peers back at us as intensely as we peer out.

~~~
cmsmith
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.

~~~
obviouslygreen
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. :)

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sbierwagen
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.

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barkingcat
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!

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VladRussian2
is it my eyes or the image has some filament structure?

~~~
mturmon
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.

