The number of planets has already reached 326, but the last four discovered have uniqueness and originality in that they were also physically photographed. One in a separate message was photographed by Hubble, and the other three were photographed as one system surrounding a young star * Will we be able to see planets in other systems with our own eyes from now on?
Astronomers have also managed to capture in one image a multi-planet solar system similar to ours orbiting another star. This follows the first planet Taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. The solar system, photographed from the Gemini Observatory in Hawaii, orbits a dusty young star called HR8799, which lies 140 light-years from Earth and is 1.5 times the size of the Sun.
The three planets whose mass is respectively 10,10, 7 and XNUMX times the mass of Jupiter orbit the star. The size of the planets decreases according to the distance from the star, just like the gaseous planets in the solar system, and there are other planets out there, but the scientists say they have not seen them yet.
"We've been trying to photograph planets from eight skies, without success, and now we've managed to photograph three planets at once," said Bruce McIntosh, an astrophysicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories.
The astronomers used the corrective optics, in the near infrared range, and the high contrast in the Keck and Gemini observatories and thus they were able to see the planets orbiting HR8799.
"For more than a decade we have known about the existence of planets outside the solar system thanks to the use of indirect techniques. However, we finally managed to get a real meter of a complete system" said McIntosh. "This is a milestone in the search and characterization of planetary systems orbiting stars."
The planets are 24,37, 67, and 30 times the distance from the Earth to the Sun. The outer planet in the new system orbits its sun within a debris-filled disk of dust, similar to the Kuiper belt formed by comets orbiting the sun beyond the orbit of Neptune, or 300 times the distance between Earth and the sun. "This is the most massive disk that surrounds all the dwarfs we know so far at a radius of XNUMX light years from Earth, said Prof. Ben Zuckerman from UCLA University.
The parent star is a bright blue, type A star. Scientists usually ignore this type of star in direct photographs because they do not allow a good contrast between the bright star and the hollow planets. However, they have one advantage over the Sun - earlier in their lifetime, they maintain a large disk around them and therefore they can form massive planets that are easier to detect. The star is also young, less than 100 million years old, meaning the planets still glow with the heat from their formation.
"Seeing the planets directly, that is, separating their light from the star's light, allows us to study them individually, and use spectroscopy to learn about their properties, such as temperature or composition," McIntosh said.
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In my opinion, the most interesting and exciting thing in this article is the use of corrective optics, which to the best of my knowledge is the "last word" in the field of telescopic optics and in its performance surpasses even the separation capability (resolution) of the Hubble Space Telescope. What excites the imagination even more is that with the improvement of this technology, it is possible and we will be able, in the not so distant future, to observe smaller and colder planets than those observed today.
Agree with every word.
Interesting... in some time, when our sun begins to swell and become a red giant, the earth will heat up so much that it will not be possible to live on it (it will happen long before). Does this mean that more distant planets that are completely frozen today will warm up? Does this mean that at least in small steps it will be possible to inhabit the moon Titan for several billion years? And maybe the red giant will start to cool down and maybe it will be possible to return home?
Greetings friends,
Ami Bachar
Ami:
The discovery of planets is also interesting - simply to test different theories regarding the formation of stars and planetary systems.
Of course, stars with the potential to support life are more interesting, but to know if a certain star meets the conditions, you must first find it.
I am not going into the question of what are the conditions that make life possible. Of course we give more probability to conditions similar to those prevailing here but we are all also aware that it is not customary to infer too much from a statistical sample of one example.
Still, Earth-like stars are more interesting - not only because of the possibility of life developing there, but also as a possible destination for migration - if and when this becomes possible (in this regard - because of the time gaps - it is of course better to look for stars that will become Earth-like when the time for the arrival of the light from them and the arrival of the expedition here has passed From here to there, but all this, of course, is still, and maybe never, science fiction).
What is important in the current article - as emphasized in its body - is the fact that our increasing ability to see the star by optical means increases our ability to identify the conditions that prevail in it, including, to see if it might support life.
I would focus the research on finding special planets:
Obviously there are countless stars and there will probably be planets around them.
We see it in the solar system and today also in other star systems.
Well, it's not surprising that the pull is on.
What I think should be tried is to find planets whose temperature on or around them is between minus and plus one hundred degrees Celsius. As soon as we find something like this, all our technology should be concentrated on their research. They also need to be old enough (say a few billion years) for a civilization to develop on top of them.
I don't really understand what's interesting about saying there are planets. I do understand that it is interesting to report on our technology, which today can observe them, even though they are a billion times brighter than the star they revolve around. But it is a methodical matter. Time and technology advance and overcome such obstacles.
Greetings friends,
Ami Bachar