
New planet-hunting camera produces best-ever image of an exoplanet - bane
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2014/may/planet-camera-macintosh-051614.html
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DanielBMarkham
I don't know if this gets said enough, but it bears repeating: we are truly
living in a golden age of astronomy. Some incredible things are happening.

In my opinion, we need to continue to bring the cost to Low Earth Orbit down
by any means necessary, including railguns for non-human traffic. Low cost-to-
orbit would dramatically speed up dozens of things, exo-planet imaging among
them.

As much as I love human space travel and robotic exploration, I have to admit
that exoplanet research and imaging is really where all the exciting stuff is
going to happen. How much longer until we have an image of another Earth?
Wonder what a space-based astronomical interferometer about the width of the
solar system could image? And that's what? A 10-20B project? Imagine the
change in the public's imagination a series of images of the countless other
planets in the galaxy would bring.

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lutorm
I think you're extremely optimistic with that cost estimate. The total cost of
the James Webb space telescope will likely end up around $10B... and that's a
6m or something infrared imager in LEO.

For a space-based interferometer mission, eLISA is a non-optical
interferometer (for gravitatinal waves) with 1e6 km arms with a _budgeted_
cost of 1.3B Euro. An interferometer needs to control spacing by a fraction of
a wavelength, but for gravitational waves that's like 1e9 m. Optical light is
1e-7m. That's 18 orders of magnitude higher precision over a proposed 3 orders
of magnitude larger baseline.

I think it's fair to say the cost of such a mission would be "out of this
world", because we have no idea how to build it, and it's not the launch cost
to LEO that's the problem.

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skrause
_> and that's a 6m or something infrared imager in LEO._

James Webb Space Telescope won't be in LEO, they'll fly it to the L2 Lagrange
point:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Webb_Space_Telescope#Orbi...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Webb_Space_Telescope#Orbit)

~~~
lutorm
Oh, you're right. My bad.

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Aardwolf
The best image ever of an exoplanet is now 36 pixels :)

I wonder if we can apply Moore's law to this? Every 1.5 year the number of
pixels doubles. So in 10 years it will be 3600 pixels, an in 20 years 360k.
Another 10 and the resolution needs to be so high that you'd have to fly to it
to take the picture :)

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InclinedPlane
The "pixels" are misleading. It isn't pixels of an image of a planet, it's
pixels of the point spread function of the diffraction limited smear of the
planet. Increasing the resolution of that image isn't going to result in being
able to resolve the planet itself, it'll just show a smudgy smeary point of
light in greater detail. In order to actually resolve the planet into real
pixels we'll need much larger telescopes, likely outside of Earth's
atmosphere. And we're a long way off from that.

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mapt
This. It would be easier to identify this sort of thing to a layman as
'0.000001 pixels, blurred over 36 pixels due to lack of optical telescope
power'.

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josephagoss
Can someone explain to me how this planet can be 10,000,000 years old? Isn't
that formation far too new for a star system that close? I would have expected
such formation to be inside a nebula near the core of the galaxy.

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iwwr
The Sun is orbiting inside the thin disk, within 3K light years of the
galactic plane, where most of stars and most new stars reside (other than the
center bulge or bar).

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thin_disk](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thin_disk)

Star ages can be estimated by their composition (older stars contain more
helium), color (bluer stars live far shorter than redder stars), brightness
for their given color (older stars burn brighter), activity (younger stars are
more active, they flare more) and if they contain protoplanetary disks (a
feature of very young stars).

Astronomers also use the HR diagram:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hertzsprung%E2%80%93Russell_dia...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hertzsprung%E2%80%93Russell_diagram)

Having a good measure of distance is important and there are various ways to
determine that:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_distance_ladder](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_distance_ladder)

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nhebb
Serious question: Is there a difference between a planet and an alien planet,
or is it just a bit of flair added to the title?

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jrajav
Pretty sure it's supposed to mean extrasolar in this context - a planet not in
our own solar system.

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nhebb
It looks like you're right. After posting my question I clicked through to the
GPI site ([http://www.planetimager.org](http://www.planetimager.org)), which
says the project is imaging and characterizing exoplanets. And, in case anyone
else is curious, an exoplanet is a planet outside our solar system.

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dang
We changed the title to say "exoplanet" instead of "alien planet".

