Two groups of astronomers have taken the first pictures of planets going around other stars. This is just astounding. We’re now able to view OTHER PLANETS. This just makes me giddy.
Dr. Christian Marois is with a team from the Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics in Victoria, British Columbia that recorded three planets circling a star (HR 8799) that is 130 light-years away in the constellation Pegasus.
Paul Kalas, leading a team from UC Berkeley, photographed a planet orbiting Fomalhaut, which is 25 light-years away in the Piscis Austrinus constellation.
Granted, if you go look at the photos, they are scratchy, grainy images with little pixels jumping around. But if you’re an astronomer, you see this and you see planets. Kepler himself would feel right at home looking at these images.
Now we’ve discovered 300 extrasolar planets out there, but based on indirect observation. This is mostly done by measuring dips in starlight as the planet passes in front of it.
“Every extrasolar planet detected so far has been a wobble on a graph,” said Bruce Macintosh, an astrophysicist from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and a member of Dr. Marois’s team. “These are the first pictures of an entire system.”
These new planets are HUGE. Just to put this into perspective, Jupiter is two and a half times larger than ALL the other planets in our solar system combined. It’s 318 times more massive than Earth (it’s diameter is equal to 11 Earths.) And we’re GREATLY expanding this size with these planets. Hell, Jupiter is so big it’s barycenter is actually above the Sun’s surface. (A barycenter is the point between two objects where they balance each other. In other words, it is the center of gravity where two or more celestial bodies orbit each other.)
The three planets orbiting HR 8799 are roughly 10, 9 and 6 times the mass of Jupiter, and orbit their star in periods of 450, 180 and 100 years respectively, all counterclockwise.
The Fomalhaut planet is about three times as massive as Jupiter, according to Dr. Kalas’s calculations, and is on the inner edge of a huge band of dust, taking roughly 872 years to complete a revolution of its star.
I feel strongly that we, as a race, need to move to the stars. We need to find other planets, other places where we can expand and grow. These sort of studies and findings are crucial to that sort of growth. That’s why I get so excited.
