Wow. Great picture of exoplanet HR8799e - 129Ly distant

[jim mcnamara]

By the GRAVITY team -

The GRAVITY instrument on ESO's Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI) has made the first direct observation of an exoplanet using optical interferometry.

Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2019-03-gravity-instrument-ground-exoplanet-imaging.html#jCp

 

[russ_watters]

If that photo is real, it's dozens of orders of magnitude [guess] higher resolution than anything I've ever seen before. We sure they didn't accidentally post an artist's conception? I've seen that before...

[edit: ehhhh, might only be 5 or 6 orders of magnitude. It's about a million and a half times further away than Jupiter and that looks like a Hubble photo of Jupiter. ]

 

[jim mcnamara]

You may be correct. I do not know. Original paper:
https://www.eso.org/public/archives/releases/sciencepapers/eso1905/eso1905a.pdf
Plus, if it were "real", it would be a computer processed image, not a real photo.

 

[jbriggs444]

From the article:

"Our observations suggest a ball of gas illuminated from the interior"

The artist's rendition clearly shows illumination from the exterior.

 

[DrClaude]

This is definitely not a picture of the planet.

The researchers were able to disentangle the light form the star for that of the planet, allowing to analyse spectrally the light and find the composition of the atmosphere. This is quite an achievement, but we're still far from having a picture of the planet in the common sense of the term.

 

[DrClaude]

Plus, if it were "real", it would be a computer processed image, not a real photo.

Like all contemporary photography?

 

[Klystron]

You may be correct. I do not know. Original paper:
https://www.eso.org/public/archives/releases/sciencepapers/eso1905/eso1905a.pdf
Plus, if it were "real", it would be a computer processed image, not a real photo.

After skimming the paper, the image is not a visible light photograph but an amalgam of gravitic and various spectra-graphic data values. Perhaps the term 'computer aided art' applies. The paper claims at least some of the infrared data is measured directly from the exoplanets. All the planetary data has been corrected for 'washout' from the primary.

 

[russ_watters]

Here's an actual photo of Antares from that telescope:

 

[ChinoSupay]

This is not a photo, is just an artistic impression

 

[jim mcnamara]

Excellent - I stand corrected.

 

[Ken G]

Also, the article said "The exoplanet is thoroughly inhospitable—leftover energy from its formation and a powerful greenhouse effect heat HR8799e to a hostile temperature of roughly 1000 °C. " So that suggests a combination of internal and reprocessed external light, either of which they could have meant by "internal illumination", but it would be spread more or less equally over the whole face of the planet. If that's even an artistic impression for this planet, it's a very poor impression. At 1000 Celsius, there would be plenty of optical emission that is not reflected light.