First images of a planet in the act of forming

Hydrogen-alpha light is a dead giveaway that the planet is still growing.

Read the whole story

 

[wyrmhole]

jmai86[/url]":3j6rr4p8]

Chuckstar[/url]":3j6rr4p8]

jmai86[/url]":3j6rr4p8]This is really awesome stuff.
On a related note, would it be possible to directly image a planet in true visible light? What tech would we need, or how big does a telescope need to be?

Hubble already did:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fomalhaut_b

EDIT: Changed the link to be the wikipedia page. Had originally linked to a pdf.

Ah right, I should clarify my original question: Photograph an extra solar planet in detail, enough to discern surface features. I'm thinking along the lines of the detail of some of the first photographs of Pluto by New Horizons.

Oh no. Not even close, and not for a very long time. It's going to be a very long time until images of exoplanets match the best pre-New Horizons image of Pluto.

The only star (other than Sol of course) that we've ever been able to resolve as a disk instead of a point, is Betelgeuse, and it looked like this. And that star is pretty close (~650 ly) and huge -- it's about as wide as the orbit of Jupiter.

This star system in question is around 400 ly away. If I had a bit more time I could try my hand at the math to figure out what kind of improvement in angular resolution we'd need to get from that image of Betelgeuse, to having Jupiter occupy two pixels in an image... but given the distances aren't wildly different, you could get a basic idea by comparing the diameter of Jupiter to the diameter of Jupiter's orbit. Biiiig.

 

[wyrmhole]

JohnDeL[/url]":1jkhb21n]

A study released today describes a new technique that has allowed scientists to observe a planet forming for the first time.[/url]

It may be the first time that they have used this technique, but it is far from the first time that we've seen a planet forming. Back in 1984 (i.e., the Stone Age), a protoplanetary disc was imaged around Vega using IRAS.

Seeing a protoplanetary disk is not the same as seeing a still-forming planet.

But it's still a cool observation.

Edit: I'm pretty sure we've also observed planets that are in a protoplanetary disk, but did not have observations that indicated those planets were still growing, as we do here. Well here's an ALMA image showing clearly that something has swept up material in various portions of a disk.

 

[wyrmhole]

The Opinionaire[/url]":rjdr8hyc]So, where are these images?

You can see a tiny version of them in the corrected DOI link bhspencer posted:

http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature15761

They are... not particularly impressive visually.

 

[wyrmhole]

Jarron[/url]":3344euo7]

wyrmhole[/url]":3344euo7]

The Opinionaire[/url]":3344euo7]So, where are these images?

You can see a tiny version of them in the corrected DOI link bhspencer posted:

http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature15761

They are... not particularly impressive visually.

Well, as someone that does stuff like this for a living, I find it very impressive (but I may be slightly biased in that assessment).

But yes, I can see how they might be disappointing given all the jaw-dropping images of Pluto coming down off of New Horizons these days.

Only in terms of visual aesthetics. It's no Pillars of Creation, is all I'm saying. In terms of what it represents, both the accomplishment of taking it and what it means scientifically, it's awesome.