Hubble Hits Paydirt: New Planet Gets Its Picture Taken
This is the first visible light image of a planet outside of our solar system.
It’s the tiny little red dot in the little square right above the inset box in which you can see hazy, non-distinct Fomalhaut b in a composite image that shows its (actually, before now, it was just a disk, as far as astronomists could tell before the latest image) position change in 2004 and 2006. The Hubble Space Telescope (back on line at last) caught this image, proving that what astronomers felt could be a planet was indeed a planet. They have estimated that the planet, Fomalhaut b, named so for the star it orbits, Fomalhaut, is three times the size of Jupiter.
Sorry to be geeky when it comes to Space and astronomy, but this is a big moment. Planets outside of our small little, teeny solar system have only just been discovered, the first being in 1995. And to get a picture, a normal, visible light picture of a extrasolar planet is like xmas and your birthday rolled into one.
Back in the 1980’s, astronomers felt that the star, Fomalhaut, was a likely candidate for supporting a planetary system. It was because Fomalhaut had signs of excess dust around it. Where there is dust, there is planets, if the dust is given long enough to collect into large enough masses to be called planets. Dust is usually a tip off to astronomers that something more interesting might be lurking around. And something interesting indeed…
Due to getting two positions of this body, astronomers at NASA have determined that Fomalhaut b revolves around Fomalhaut every 872 years.
Fomalhaut, Fomalhaut b, NASA, Hubble, Space, Telescope, astronomers, science, astronomy
March 6th, 2009 at 3:39 pm
[...] After years and years of using Earth-based telescopes to find planetary cousins, NASA is moving the base of operations (well, the “eye” of operations) to an Earth orbit in order to get past the cloudy, hazier Earth atmosphere. One of the obstacles that planet-hunting scientists have is that atmosphere, and much like the Hubble Telescope, imaging of distant objects gets waaay better off-planet. [...]