Richard WarnickExoplanets—Seeing Is Believing
The latest issue of Science reports that Astronomer Paul Kalas has captured the first visible-light images of a Jupiter-size planet some 25 light years from our solar system using a camera mounted on the Hubble telescope. The planet orbits the star Fomalhaut along the inner edge of a vast dust belt (pictured below).
The Kalas images are not available online yet, as far as I can tell [see update below]. They are the first-ever optical images of any of the 300 or so known exoplanets beyond our Solar System.
Ring Around a Star
NASA Hubble Space Telescope’s most detailed visible-light image ever taken of a narrow, dusty ring around the nearby star Fomalhaut offers the strongest evidence yet that an unruly and unseen planet may be gravitationally tugging on the ring.
Hubble unequivocally shows that the center of the ring is a whopping 1.4 billion miles away from the star. The most plausible explanation is that an unseen planet moving in an elliptical orbit is reshaping the ring with its gravitational pull.
The observations offer insights into our solar system’s formative years, when the planets played a game of demolition derby with the debris left over from the formation of our planets, gravitationally scattering many objects across space. Some icy material may have collided with the inner solar system planets, irrigating them with water formed in the colder outer solar system.
Image Credit: NASA, ESA, P. Kalas and J. Graham (University of California, Berkeley) and M. Clampin (NASA/GSFC)
It’s purely coincidental that the Fomalhaut System looks like the Eye of Sauron.
UPDATE: The Hubble website has the images of Fomalhaut b, taken with the Advanced Camera for Surveys aboard NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope.
November 13th, 2008 at 5:00 pm
Simply incredible!
November 13th, 2008 at 6:20 pm
Maybe it’s Kolob!
November 13th, 2008 at 9:29 pm
The wonders of science! Imagine what we could discover if the countries of the world united in the cause of discovery instead of bombing each other. Imagine what we could discover if we hadn’t wasted all that money in Iraq.
November 13th, 2008 at 10:02 pm
Imagine. You reminded me of John Lennon. “Nothing to kill or die for, and no religion, too.”
November 14th, 2008 at 12:18 pm
Obama the Paul
Nah, it looks more like the Eye of Sauron. The dark lord has returned and the Ring of Power has been remade and in the hands of the Democrats. Is there a humble hobbit who can save the world this time?
November 15th, 2008 at 1:32 am
Becky:
I have to wonder if David Archuleta has ever seen that verse in the song he loved to sing. I have nothing against David, he seems like a very nice person, and I wish the very best for him, but those words were never uttered when he sang the song. I doubt Lennon would have been comfortable with that fact.