Extrasolar Planets Imaged by Hubble and Gemini!
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.
November 13, 2008 at 8:37 pm
I never thought I’d see that in my lifetime. Shows you what I know!
Any word about Spirit?
November 13, 2008 at 9:01 pm
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…
November 14, 2008 at 3:18 am
[...] to share. I think there is something that the Hubble team isn’t telling us about their latest planet-discovery [...]
November 18, 2008 at 12:50 am
[...] 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 [...]