13 November 2008
Extrasolar Planets Imaged by Hubble and Gemini!
Posted by Ryan Anderson
There was a big announcement today: the Hubble space telescope has taken an image of a planet orbiting the bright star Fomalhaut! And not only that, the Gemini telescope has taken an image of TWO planets orbiting the star HR8799! Phil Plait has a nice and very excited post about this over at bad astronomy. You can also go straight to the source and read the JPL press release. I’ll let you read those and just post the pictures here. In both cases the light from the star is blocked and the planets are little tiny blips that are barely distinguishable from the noise.
I never thought I’d see that in my lifetime. Shows you what I know!
Any word about Spirit?
I haven’t heard anything yet. I’ll post an update as soon as I hear something and know that it is cleared for public release…
[…] to share. I think there is something that the Hubble team isn’t telling us about their latest planet-discovery […]
[…] extraordinaire) has a really interesting and thoughful post on his blog about his reaction to the announcement that planets around other stars had been imaged. Here’s the quote that he gave to a reporter […]