First Images of 2 Planets Outside Our Solar System

We've been able to calculate that there are planets around other stars but these are the first direct images of not 1, not 2, but 3 exoplanets. It is an absolutely amazing feat and one that not too long ago was considered almost impossible. We'll it seems that the "almost" was the key here. Here's the story from Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy blog.

This is incredible: For the first time, ever, astronomers have captured an optical image of a planet orbiting a star like our own.

And that’s not all: we also have a second picture showing TWO planets orbiting a second star!

(Calm down. Breathe, breathe.)

The first picture is from Hubble. Ready? Here it is:

Do you see it? That tiny spark, that wee blip of light? It may not look like much, but it is in fact a normal planet orbiting a normal star, 250 trillion kilometers from Earth.

Holy Haleakala.

The picture as a whole needs some splainin’. The star in question

is Fomalhaut, a star easily visible to the unaided eye; it’s the brightest star in the constellation of Piscis Austrinus, the 18th brightest in the sky, and only 25 light years away. It’s literally millions of times brighter than the planet, so the Hubble camera uses an occulting bar, a small piece of metal that blocks the brightest part of the star’s image. The blacked-out area in the center of the picture is where Fomalhaut is (also, the star’s image has been digitally subtracted using an image of another star as a template; that further reduces the amount of unwanted light). The radial lines are not real; they are an optical effect of the very bright star. The ring is real; it’s dust leftover from the formation of the star and the planet. In fact, the thinness of the ring was a big factor in assuming a planet was lurking there; the planet’s gravity sculpts the ring, keeping it narrowly confined. Also, the ring is off-center from the star, and a planet in an elliptical orbit would explain that nicely.

The planet itself is just that small dot, almost lost in the noise from the star and the light from the ring. I’ll be honest; had I been analyzing the image, I might have missed it at first. But it’s there, and it’s real. Images taken almost two years apart show that the planet is moving with the star, and is consistent with it orbiting Fomalhaut at a distance of about 18 billion km (11 billion miles). That’s four times the distance of Neptune from the Sun. It takes 872 years to make one complete orbit. The mass is not easy to determine, and is estimated using its effect on the ring; it’s likely to be about the same size and mass as Jupiter.

The planet is unnamed, and is simply called Fomalhaut b.

I am reeling from this image. Years ago, when I still worked on Hubble, I did some work on planetary debris rings like this, including seeing if we could directly see planets near stars. The amount of work that goes into this type of discovery is phenomenal, and so I’m stunned by the success of it.

This is huge news.

And it gets even huger. Because there’s more:

That image is the first to directly show two planets orbiting another star! It’s a near-infrared image using the giant Gemini North 8 meter telescope. Like in the Hubble image, the star’s light has been blocked, allowing the two planets to be seen (labeled b and c).

The star is called HR 8799. It’s a bit more massive (1.5 times) and more luminous (5x) than the Sun, and lies about 130 light years from Earth. The planets in this picture orbit it at distances of 6 billion km (3.6 billion miles) and 10.5 billion km (6.3 billion miles). A third planet, not seen in this image but discovered later using the Keck 10 meter telescope, orbits the star closer in at a distance of 3.8 billion km (2.3 billion miles).

So there it is. The first ever family portrait of a planetary system.

One thing that makes these particular planets a bit easier to find than usual is that they are young; HR 8799 and its children are only about 60 million years old. That means the planets are still glowing from the leftover heat of their formation, and that adds to their brightness. Eventually (in millions of years), as they cool, they will glow only by reflected light from the star, and be far harder to see. Fomalhaut b, in the Hubble image, is much older (200 million years), and glows only by reflected light from Fomalhaut. If it were much smaller or dimmer (or closer to the blinding light of the star), we wouldn’t have been able to see it at all.

These images were basically science fiction just a few years ago. Now they are fact. We have an optical picture of a planet orbiting another sun-like star, and a picture of two planets orbiting another star.

Wow. Just wow.

OK, now that you have the news, a few caveats. We now know of more than 300 planets orbiting other stars. And a planet has been imaged before, but it was orbiting a brown dwarf, which is different than a normal star like the Sun. Brown dwarfs are so-called "failed stars", much smaller than the Sun. Another possible planet orbiting a sun-like star has been imaged, but has not yet been confirmed. So these images here really are firsts. They are history.

I still can hardly believe it, and I worked on data like this! Yet there they are, proof that our planetary system is not the only one in the Universe. We knew this already; indirect evidence confirms planets and even multiple planetary systems around many nearby stars.

But there’s nothing like a picture. There, with your own eyes, you can see for yourself that other planets exist. They are not Earthlike, not even a little… they are massive, young, hot planets that are probably mostly gaseous and completely inhospitable.

But there they are.

In a few years, we’ll have more pictures like these. And we’ll get better. Our telescopes will get bigger, our equipment more sensitive, our techniques improved as we understand their capabilities. And the pictures of other planets will roll in.

How long before we see the Holy Grail, the first image of a terrestrial planet, orbiting a star like the Sun at just the right distance for liquid water to bathe its surface? It may not be for a decade or two, but mark my words: that day will arrive. And when it does, well, we’ll just have to rewrite the history books again, won’t we?

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Size Does Matter...Once Again

Black holes, it's their size and not their mass that makes them so strong. It sounded contrary to me but after watching the video I feel stupid not knowing this. I love this guys videos.

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India to the Moon

The "race" to the moon widens with the entry of India. They have launched their first satellite on its way to orbit around the moon anf investigate the polar regions of the moon, something we have yet to do. It is the first step in their plan to eventually send a man to the moon.

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A Tiny Glimpse

In 2003, the Hubble telescope concentrated for four months on an "empty" part of the sky less than 1/10th the size of the full moon. Here is what it found.

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Say Cheese

The First Photo From Space




In 1946, rocket-borne cameras gave us our first look at Earth from beyond the atmosphere.
From Air&Space
By Tony Reichhardt

On October 24, 1946, not long after the end of World War II and years before the Sputnik satellite opened the space age, a group of soldiers and scientists in the New Mexico desert saw something new and wonderful—the first pictures of Earth as seen from space.

The grainy, black-and-white photos were taken from an altitude of 65 miles by a 35-millimeter motion picture camera riding on a V-2 missile launched from the White Sands Missile Range. Snapping a new frame every second and a half, the rocket-borne camera climbed straight up, then fell back to Earth minutes later, slamming into the ground at 500 feet per second. The camera itself was smashed, but the film, protected in a steel cassette, was unharmed.

Fred Rulli was a 19-year-old enlisted man assigned to the recovery team that drove into the desert to retrieve film from those early V-2 shots. When the scientists found the cassette in good shape, he recalls, "They were ecstatic, they were jumping up and down like kids." Later, back at the launch site, "when they first projected [the photos] onto the screen, the scientists just went nuts."

Before 1946, the highest pictures ever taken of the Earth’s surface were from the Explorer II balloon, which had ascended 13.7 miles in 1935, high enough to discern the curvature of the Earth. The V-2 cameras reached more than five times that altitude, where they clearly showed the planet set against the blackness of space. When the movie frames were stitched together, the panoramas covered a million square miles or more at a single glance. As Clyde Holliday, the engineer who developed the camera, wrote in National Geographic in 1950, the V-2 photos showed for the first time "how our Earth would look to visitors from another planet coming in on a space ship."

It was one of many firsts for the V-2 research program of the late 1940s, during which the Army fired dozens of captured German missiles brought to White Sands in 300 railroad cars at the end of the war. While the missileers used the V-2s to refine their own rocket designs, scientists were invited to pack instruments inside the nosecone to study temperatures, pressures, magnetic fields and other physical characteristics of the unexplored upper atmosphere.

Holliday worked for the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), alongside pioneering space scientists like James Van Allen and S. Fred Singer, both of whom would later be involved in planning the first U.S. satellites. Singer—better known today as a dogged skeptic of global warming with the Science and Environmental Policy Project in Arlington, Virginia—would analyze the photos that came back from the V-2 cameras to determine the rocket’s orientation to the Earth, a job he remembers as "quite difficult." The missile engineers needed to know how the rocket was steering through the upper atmosphere, and the scientists wanted to determine from which direction cosmic rays hitting their instruments were coming. Hardly anyone was interested in what the pictures revealed about geography or meteorology, at least not at first. "We considered clouds to be a nuisance," says Singer.

But Holliday, an instrument specialist at APL, well understood the importance of the photos for the study of Earth. Cy O’Brien, who worked in the lab’s public affairs office beginning in 1950, says Holliday was "in an environment with super-Ph.D.s, and he wanted to make clear that photography was a science, too."
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Holliday’s discussion of the photos therefore leaned toward the technical. In those days before Walt Disney and Collier’s magazine planted the idea of space exploration in the public imagination, he was even sparing with his use of the term "space." The V-2 photos, he wrote in 1950, were taken in "the little-known reaches of the upper air." Today, even though the definition is somewhat arbitrary, anything above 100 kilometers (62.5 miles) is considered space.

More than 1,000 Earth pictures were returned from V-2s between 1946 and 1950, from altitudes as high as 100 miles. The photos, showing huge expanses of the American southwest, appeared in newspapers and were scrutinized by scientists from the U.S. Weather Bureau. In his National Geographic article, Holliday offered a few predictions as to where it all might lead: "Results of these tests now are pointing to a time when cameras may be mounted on guided missiles for scouting enemy territory in war, mapping inaccessible regions of the earth in peacetime, and even photographing cloud formations, storm fronts, and overcast areas over an entire continent in a few hours." Going out on a limb, he speculated that "the entire land area of the globe might be mapped in this way."

Fred Rulli, the former member of the camera recovery team, now counts himself lucky to have been in the "select group" that saw the first pictures from space as they came in. At 19, it seemed to him like just another Army job. But he recalls a friend at White Sands, another soldier—60 years later he’s forgotten his name—who was more alive to the future unfolding in front of them. Pointing to the rockets, the scientists and the clear New Mexico sky, the friend would turn to Rulli and say with amazement, "Do you realize what’s going on here?"

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Up, Up and Away!

Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon is throwing his hat into the civilian space program. He has taken his first step with the November launch of Goddard. A vertical take-off and landing vehicle.

Blue Origin revealed
by Alan Boyle

After years of working behind closed doors and locked gates, Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos has finally lifted the curtain that shrouded Blue Origin, his space tourism venture.

Among the goodies now displayed on Blue Origin's Web site are photos and videos from the venture's maiden test flight in November, as seen from the ground as well as a rocket-cam ... pictures from the West Texas launch range and Blue Origin's production facility in a Seattle suburb ... and even the Blue Origin coat of arms, emblazoned with the motto "Gradatim Ferociter" (Step by Step, Courageously).



Bezos founded Blue Origin in 2000, with the aim of developing a new type of vertical-takeoff, vertical-landing rocket ship capable of taking passengers to the edge of space. At altitudes in excess of 62 miles (100 kilometers), customers should be able to scan Earth's curving expanse beneath a black sky, experience a few minutes of weightlessness and justifiably brag afterward that they've been to outer space. Blue Origin's current development schedule calls for commercial trips to start in 2010.

Details about the operation have been hard to come by. That bit about 2010, for example, comes from the environmental assessment that was required in order for the Federal Aviation Administration to approve test flights at the Blue Origin launch facility, built on Bezos' sprawling ranch near Van Horn, Texas. Even the illustration on the cover of the draft report was adapted from the design for the Delta Clipper, an earlier-generation rocket ship.

Blue Origin's freshly updated Web site gives the public its first look at Goddard, the rocket prototype that's being used for the initial round of test flights. The cute, conical craft - named after rocket pioneer Robert Goddard - can be seen rising from a circular pad of concrete to a height of about 285 feet (87 meters), then coming back down to a soft landing.

Nine thrusters are on the craft's underbelly. In its literature, Blue Origin says it's developing a peroxide/kerosene propulsion system, so I have to assume that's what's being used here.

Accompanying all the snazzy graphics is a letter from Bezos himself, in which he explains Blue Origin's lofty goal:

"We’re working, patiently and step-by-step, to lower the cost of spaceflight so that many people can afford to go and so that we humans can better continue exploring the solar system. Accomplishing this mission will take a long time, and we’re working on it methodically. We believe in incremental improvement and in keeping investments at a pace that's sustainable. Slow and steady is the way to achieve results, and we do not kid ourselves into thinking this will get easier as we go along. Smaller, more frequent steps drive a faster rate of learning, help us maintain focus, and give each of us an opportunity to see our latest work fly sooner."

He also touts Amazon.com's S3 servers (which are housing the data on the Web site) as well as job opportunities at Blue Origin. The photos show the brand-spanking-new digs at Blue Origin's production facility in Kent, Wash. ... cheering employees at the maiden launch in Texas ... and even a grinning Bezos holding a broken champagne cork ("Fortunately, our other valve operations went more smoothly," he joked).

The employment angle appears to be the motivation behind the increased candor.

"As you noted, the new site does make more information available to potential applicants for positions at Blue Origin," Bruce Hicks, a Houston-based spokesman for the venture, told me in an e-mail.

The glasnost over Goddard still doesn't extend all the way, of course. For example, there's no mention of Blue Origin's second, less spectacular test run in December. In response to my inquiry about that, Hicks said, "I just want to remind you that we said previously we didn't plan to comment one way or another about tests, whether they are scheduled, were scheduled, happened, didn't happen, etc."

This means we'll just have to keep checking the FAA's notices to airmen for word of future tests.

Also, there's no reference to the potential price tag for the commercial flights to come. It may well be that Bezos hasn't yet set a price point (see "patiently and step-by-step," above).

For now, this week's revelations are enough: Based on the video of the first flight, it's clear that Blue Origin could give Armadillo Aerospace a serious run for NASA's money at the next Lunar Lander Challenge in New Mexico - just up the road a piece from Van Horn.

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Lost lakes of Titan are found at last

Lost lakes of Titan are found at last
From Physorg.com



This colorized radar view from Cassini shows lakes on Titan. Color intensity is proportional to how much radar brightness is returned. The colors are not a representation of what the human eye would see. Image credit: NASA/JPL/USGS




Lakes of methane have been spotted on Saturn's largest moon, Titan, boosting the theory that this strange, distant world bears beguiling similarities to Earth, according to a new study.



Titan has long intrigued space scientists, as it is the only moon in the Solar System to have a dense atmosphere -- and its atmosphere, like Earth's, mainly comprises nitrogen.

Titan's atmosphere is also rich in methane, although the source for this vast store of hydrocarbons is unclear.

Methane, on the geological scale, has a relatively limited life. A molecule of the compound lasts several tens of millions of years before it is broken up by sunlight.

Given that Titan is billions of years old, the question is how this atmospheric methane gets to be renewed. Without replenishment, it should have disappeared long ago.

A popular hypothesis is that it comes from a vast ocean of hydrocarbons.

But when the US spacecraft Cassini sent down a European lander, Huygens, to Titan in 2005, the images sent back were of a rugged landscape veiled in an orange haze.

There were indeed signs of methane flows and methane precipitation, but nothing at all that pointed to any sea of the stuff.

But a flyby by Cassini on July 22 last year has revealed, thanks to a radar scan, 75 large, smooth, dark patches between three and 70 kilometers across (two and 42 miles) across that appear to be lakes of liquid methane, scientists report on Thursday.

They believe the lakes prove that Titan has a "methane cycle" -- a system that is like the water cycle on Earth, in which the liquid evaporates, cools and condenses and then falls as rain, replenishing the surface liquid.

As on Earth, Titan's surface methane may well be supplemented by a "table" of liquid methane that seeps through the rock, the paper suggests.

Some of the methane lakes seem only partly filled, and other depressions are dry, which suggests that, given the high northerly latitudes where they were spotted, the methane cycle follows Titan's seasons.

In winter, the lakes expand, while in summer, they shrink or dry up completely -- again, another parallel with Earth's hydrological cycle.

The study, which appears on Thursday in the British weekly journal Nature, is headed by Ellen Stofan of Proxemy Research in Virginia and University College London.

Titan and Earth are of course very different, especially in their potential for nurturing life. Titan is frigid, dark and, as far as is known, waterless, where as Earth is warm, light and has lots of liquid water.

But French astrophysicist Christophe Sotin says both our planet and Titan have been sculpted by processes that, fundamentally, are quite similar.

The findings "add to the weight of evidence that Titan is a complex world in which the interaction between the inner and outer layers is controlled by processes similar to those that must have dominated the evolution of any Earth-like planet," Sotin said in a commentary.

"Indeed, as far as we know," Sotin added, "there is only one planetary body that displays more dynamism than Titan. Its name is Earth."

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In Formative Years, the Sun Had Sisters

By Robin Lloyd on Space.com
The Sun had sisters when it was born, according to new research, hundreds to thousands of them.

And at least one was a supernova, providing further support for the idea that there could be lots of planets around other stars since our solar system emerged in such an explosive environment.

"We know that the majority of stars in our galaxy were born in star clusters," said Leslie Looney, who arrived at the solar sibling finding along with his colleagues at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "Now we also know that the newborn solar system not only arose in such a cluster, but also survived the impact of an exploding star. This suggests that planetary systems are impressively rugged and may be common in even the most tumultuous stellar nurseries."

The evidence for the solar sisters was found in daughters—such as decayed particles from radioactive isotopes of iron—trapped in meteorites, which can be studied as fossil remnants of the early solar system.

These daughter species allowed Looney and his colleagues to discern that a supernova with the mass of about 20 suns exploded relatively near the early Sun when it formed 4.6 billion years ago; and where there are supernovas or any massive star, you also see hundreds to thousands of sun-like stars, he said.

The cluster of thousands of stars dispersed billions of years ago due to a lack of gravitational pull, Looney said, leaving the sisters "lost in space" and our Sun looking like an only child ever since, he said.

The research will be detailed in the Astrophysical Journal.

The finding also has exciting implications for life in other solar systems, Looney said, since most stars are born in clusters.

"If our favorite planet, Earth, was born in the nasty environment of a cluster, with the increased radiation and gravitational effects, then the majority of stars could also have planets," Looney told SPACE.com. "Not only have planets, but have planets where terrestrial life can occur."

Astronomers now should focus more attention on how planets form in clusters, he said. "It may be easier to form planets than we expected," he said.

Isotopes and supernovas

When massive stars explode and go supernova, they create radioactive isotopes that are blown outward and mix with nebular gas and dust as they condense into stars and planets. In the case of our solar system, that means some of the isotopes were trapped in the rocks that hardened to form the early solar system. Meteorites are remnants of those rocks, so they contain the radioactive offspring, or daughter species, of the isotopes created by the supernova.

Looney and his colleagues used measured abundances of the daughter species to calculate that the supernova sibling was about 0.32 to 5.22 light-years from the Sun. The closest star system to the Sun today is Alpha Centauri at 4.36 light-years.

"The supernova was stunningly close," said Looney's co-author Brian Fields. "Our solar system was still in the process of forming when the supernova occurred."

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