First bona fide image of planets outside Solar System

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7725584.stm


system with 3 planets.


system with 1 planet.

That is pretty cool!

Looks like bad Photoshop filters.

Exoplanets!!!
Never heard about HR 8799 Solar System.

Looks like bad Photoshop filters.

LOL? You should read the link provided.....

@ 2nd picture

How do they even declare that to be a planet -_- I mean, it could just be fuzz from solar radiation, orbital debris, or w/e that is.

Because the people who are studying these systems are professionals that have gone through years of schooling and work with precise instruments to detect planetary motion and dips in star brightness. Things published in academic articles are peer-reviewed by other researchers and professors at other universities to see if they can duplicate the results.

Also, they have the latest, modern, and advanced technology.

definitely photoshop

definitely photoshop

LOL. Just LOL.

Anyways this is an epic discovery

Alright the people shall mobilize! We need an interstellar fleet and planetary assault ships. Even though it is likely uninhabited (Earth is lukily protected by a gas giant named Jupiter) it is always worth invading a planet. But really that is a cool discovery...

Stop getting fooled into thinking we can get big high-resolution images like the artist's renditions they tend to show in newspapers and on TV. Those images are literally physically impossible. These images still kick ass though.

Because the people who are studying these systems are professionals that have gone through years of schooling and work with precise instruments to detect planetary motion and dips in star brightness. Things published in academic articles are peer-reviewed by other researchers and professors at other universities to see if they can duplicate the results.

True, but look at Pluto. For 75 years, scientists all over the world were convinced, wihtout a shadow of a doubt, that Pluto was a planet. Then as science became more advanced, they realised that there were other "Plutos" in orbit around our Sun, and decided that it was no longer qualified to be called a planet. (dwarf planet/giant asteroid lol?)


While yes, this is an amazing discovery, once they do more research into it they could find out that these other planets are not what they expected.

"You see an object next to a star and you might think it's a planet," commented Mark McCaughrean, an astrophysicist at the University of Exeter, UK.

"But you have to watch it for several years and make sure that it moves around the star and with the star as it moves across the sky. Though I've been very sceptical in the past, these ones all seem pretty real to me," he told BBC News

These are a lot further away than Pluto is, so personally I wiould be inclined tot ake all of this with a pinch of salt :X It said that some of them are not very dense in mass, so they could just be giant dust balls XD

It is pretty amazing though... The fact we are starting to see things even further away is an accomplishment in itself.

That's really cool that we finally have a definite picture of a planet outside our solar system.

I can't wait until Hubble gets its final upgrades. Its provided us with so many beautiful pictures of the universe already. Who knows what we could possibly see with the ability to look deeper into the unknown.

True, but look at Pluto. For 75 years, scientists all over the world were convinced, wihtout a shadow of a doubt, that Pluto was a planet. Then as science became more advanced, they realised that there were other "Plutos" in orbit around our Sun, and decided that it was no longer qualified to be called a planet. (dwarf planet/giant asteroid lol?)

That's only because there was no clear-cut definition of what a planet was. People have debated the planetary status of Pluto ever since it was discovered. The planets around those stars aren't ambiguous because they're not small enough to cause ambiguity, and they're not large enough to be classified into that grey area between a planet and a brown dwarf. There's a difference between debating the planetary status of Pluto for 75 years and thinking that the pixel in the 2nd image is just some fuzz.

Because the people who are studying these systems are professionals that have gone through years of schooling and work with precise instruments to detect planetary motion and dips in star brightness. Things published in academic articles are peer-reviewed by other researchers and professors at other universities to see if they can duplicate the results.

These... articles... can we fap to them?

JK

I just wish there was a way to tell an Earth-like planet from a speck in the void. Colonizing a planet would be incredible, if we could pull it off.

Another one! I remember that this star system was the reason I started reading about astronomy when I was little.

http://www.livescience.com/space/081125-...toris.html



That image of the Beta Pictoris system really got me asking myself questions when I was like 7.

Hmmm why don't they make pictures like this from the star closest to us, Alpha Centauri? Or is B Pictoris a Super Giant star with Super Giant planets? :o

The Centauri system has no gas giant planets or they would've been detected a long time ago. That planet around Beta Pictoris is like eight times the mass of Jupiter and the Beta Pictoris system itself is an infant solar system around an infant star.

That's really cool that we finally have a definite picture of a planet outside our solar system.

I can't wait until Hubble gets its final upgrades. Its provided us with so many beautiful pictures of the universe already. Who knows what we could possibly see with the ability to look deeper into the unknown.

It's too bad the Hubble is going to be decommissioned sometime in 2010. There have been some amazing photos from Hubble. But the thing is getting old, it's 18 years old and it runs on an old Intel 486 with 768k of memory. Once the Hubble is gone, it will make way for the James Webb Space Telescope. I can't wait to see what kind of pictures this thing will capture.