A 12-year sequence of telescope images of a star and four planets orbiting

tocs3

Amazing. Scrolling down one of the comments has an animation of starts around the center of the Milky Way. I have seen a few short ones of nebulae. There should be much much more of this sort of thing. I appreciate that scientist are not always after the pretty pictures. They can be expensive, do not always give the data needed, and the experiments do not always produce data that has obvious pretty picture potential. Still, for the average non professional scientist (me) the pictures are about all I will ever get out of the science.

317070

Wow, in terms of angle, how far are these planets separated from the star? I always thought we would never be able to image something like that. The distances would be too small and the contrast too large to figure something at the resolution we can get on earth. I'll need to read up on how this was done.

Kaxo

The noise from the blocked-out star noticably decreases in 2017. Is that due to changes in the stars' activity cycle, or is that due to better processing/capture technology?

Sarkie

They need to remove that one frame

mmooss

From ~0:04 - 0:05, two dots at ~10 and 8 o'clock fade in and out simultaneously, with roughly the size and brightness of the planets. They peak at observation ~2016-07-06. Any idea what they are? Their balanced position and simultaneous changes make them seem like an artifact of the imaging.

sixothree

When my mother was born, plate tectonics was a hypothesis. When I was born we didn't know for certain if planets existed outside of our solar system.

7373737373

Also check out the Simulated Observation of the Solar System by the Habitable Worlds Observatory (under "Videos"), expected to be launched in the 2040s, the first to be able to detect Earth-like planets around Sun-like stars! https://habitableworldsobservatory.org/multimedia DrBecky's video on it: https://youtube.com/watch?v=z2JIkAPcdnU

Juvination

What are the odds of there being smaller exoplanets that are effectively being outshone by the others? Since each one these is more massive than Jupitar.

arlattimore

Space and the enormity of it breaks your mind when you start thinking about it. The star in the middle of the animation, is approximately 20AU (Astronomical Units) in size looking at the scale line. 20AU is approximately 1.8b miles/3b kilometres or approximately the distance from the Sun to Uranus. If Google's correct, if everyone on Earth lived on that star - each and every one of us could have a backyard larger than the surface area of Earth ;p

bananzamba

There are many more of these : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_directly_imaged_exopla...

wthomp

Not to self-plug, but here's my video of the same four planets: https://sefffal.github.io/images/orbital-animation.mp4 The creator of the GIF above used a data from a range of different telescopes and wavelengths, whereas I made this with using data only from same telescope (Keck), instrument, and wavelength (3.5 microns; near infrared).

hatthew

Worth being very clear that this is not a real video of the system, it's 10 static images with a few hundred interpolated "fake" frames. Still very cool though.

ortusdux

I'm excited for the leap in this tech that the Nancy Grace Roman telescope's new chronograph promises. https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/the-roman-coronagraph-inst... The Roman Coronagraph is designed to detect planets 100 million times fainter than their stars, which is 100 to 1,000 times better than existing space-based coronagraphs. The Roman Coronagraph will be capable of directly imaging reflected starlight from a planet akin to Jupiter in size, temperature, and distance from its parent star.

desireco42

I will just say that this short movie is something most beautiful I've seen in last several years. To be able to see this, for real, not as a side-effect to the star is absolutely mind blowing.

whiterook6

I swear I'm not trying to criticize, but, uh--why only 10 or so photos? Why not just film it long term? Is it our position in earth's orbit that only lets us image that system once a year or so?

desireco42

So all we have to do is send telescope right up and let it record...