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Exoplanet's misstep raises doubts
Nature ^
| Friday, September 23, 2011
| Eric Hand
Posted on 10/02/2011 6:10:05 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
Paul Kalas, an astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley, and lead author on the 2008 study, says the latest image indicates that the planet's orbit crosses into the dust disk. And that has led Ray Jayawardhana, an astronomer at the University of Toronto in Canada, to question the planet's existence. On such a trajectory, the planet's gravitational influence would have previously disrupted the clearly delineated disk. "It's quite clear that the original story cannot stand anymore," Jayawardhana says.
Kalas acknowledges that the latest data point is puzzling, but he says he remains confident that Fomalhaut b is a planet. "You have one scientist trying to create a controversy out of nothing," he says. Hundreds of exoplanets have been detected indirectly by measuring their gravitational influence on the stars they orbit or by recording brightness changes as they cross in front of their stars...
Fomalhaut b... is far too bright in visible light for something expected to be only a few times the size of Jupiter. And ground-based follow-up observations in the infrared have been fruitless, even though this is the part of spectrum where hot, youthful planets are supposed to be brightest.
Kalas says one explanation may be that the Fomalhaut system is older than previously thought, and therefore cooler and fainter in the infrared. And, he says, the excessive optical brightness can be explained if the planet is surrounded by bright material, just as Saturn is surrounded by a system of rings, which would increase its overall reflectivity.
Jayawardhana says this alone should bump Fomalhaut b from the list of directly imaged planets, because the light would be coming from the dust, not the planet's surface. "They continue to call it a directly imaged planet," he says. "I think it's time to stop doing that."
(Excerpt) Read more at nature.com ...
TOPICS: Astronomy; Science
KEYWORDS: fomalhaut; fomalhautb; xplanets
Two successive images of Fomalhaut b suggest it is following a conventional planetary orbit (white line). A 2010 image, however, shows the object straying from this course. [NASA/ ESA/Ref. 1]
1
posted on
10/02/2011 6:10:12 AM PDT
by
SunkenCiv
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Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. 2002 October 11 Fomalhaut Dust Disk Indicates Planets Drawing Credit: David A. Hardy, ROE, ATC, NSF, NASA Explanation: One of the brightest stars on the sky likely has planets. Fomalhaut, actually the 17th brightest star in the night sky, is a mere 22 light-years away but only a fraction of the age of our Sun. Recent observations in far infrared light with a detector cooled to near zero...
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NASA Hubble Space Telescope's most detailed visible-light image ever taken of a narrow, dusty ring around the nearby star Fomalhaut (HD 216956), 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 (15 astronomical units) away from the star. This is a distance equal to nearly halfway across our solar system. The most plausible explanation, astronomers said, is that an unseen planet moving in an elliptical orbit is reshaping the ring with its gravitational pull. The geometrically...
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Quillen used new images from the Hubble Space Telescope that caught the star, Fomalhaut, and its surrounding ring almost edge-on and in more detail than ever before. Fomalhaut, 25 light-years away, is the brightest star in the autumn sky. Using a device called a coronagraph that blocks out a star's light so dimmer objects near it can be seen, the Hubble revealed that Fomalhaut was indeed off-center within its ring. The images were also clear enough to show that the ring itself had a surprisingly sharp edge... The sharp inside edge of Fomalhaut, Quillen calculated, demanded that a relatively small,...
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Three exoplanets orbiting the same star have been imaged directly
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The first-ever pictures of planets outside the solar system have been released in two studies. Using the latest techniques in space technology, astronomers at NASA and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory used direct-imaging techniques to capture pictures of four newly discovered planets orbiting stars outside our solar system. "After all these years, it's amazing to have a picture showing not one but three planets," said physicist Bruce Macintosh of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California. "The discovery of the HR 8799 system is a crucial step on the road to the ultimate detection of another Earth," he said....
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NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has taken the first visible-light snapshot of a planet circling another star. Estimated to be no more than three times Jupiter's mass, the planet, called Fomalhaut b, orbits the bright southern star Fomalhaut, located 25 light-years away in the constellation Piscis Australis, or the "Southern Fish."Fomalhaut has been a candidate for planet hunting ever since an excess of dust (a telltale sign of planet formation) was discovered around the star in the early 1980s by NASA's Infrared Astronomy Satellite, IRAS. In 2004, the coronagraph in the High Resolution Camera on Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys produced...
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posted on
10/02/2011 6:12:46 AM PDT
by
SunkenCiv
(It's never a bad time to FReep this link -- https://secure.freerepublic.com/donate/)
To: VanDeKoik; Lonesome in Massachussets; KevinDavis; annie laurie; Knitting A Conundrum; Viking2002; ..
Sounds to me like Fomalhaut b has at least one moon.
3
posted on
10/02/2011 6:13:00 AM PDT
by
SunkenCiv
(It's never a bad time to FReep this link -- https://secure.freerepublic.com/donate/)
4
posted on
10/02/2011 6:14:34 AM PDT
by
SunkenCiv
(It's never a bad time to FReep this link -- https://secure.freerepublic.com/donate/)
To: SunkenCiv
I always enjoy your posts because I love planetary science and especially atrosphysics. What is interesting about the exoplanet craze is that we have some proof in the data, but often the new findings remind me of the global warming crowd. I think some science teams are too eager to prove that they found the 701st exoplanet. It’s all great, but there is a bit of over-confidence in the field over the last 10 years. Keep on posting.
5
posted on
10/02/2011 6:24:02 AM PDT
by
lefty-lie-spy
(Stay metal. For the Horde \m/("_")\m/ - via iPhone from Tokyo.)
To: lefty-lie-spy
Hundreds have been found, hundreds more have been suspected but not verified. The number of exoplanets known will probably double (at least) in 2012, and systems already known to contain one planet will be shown to have even more, as happened with 55 Cancri.
Global warming is strictly a political construct, has and had zero basis in any data or scientific study, and has been shown to be total BS every single time it has been studied for real, necessitating a retreat to some other unfounded political position. Recently there was a move back to “excess energy is being stored in the ocean’s depths” which is clearly A) not true (it’s been studied) and B) physically impossible, literally impossible.
IOW, there’s absolutely no connection between the global warming demagoguery and exoplanet studies.
The first (modern) claim of an exoplanet was Barnard’s Star, a red dwarf that is in closer proximity to us than most other stars. Astronomer Peter van de Kamp claimed discovery of one, and then two, planets in orbit, based on a perceived wobble in the motion of the star. It is generally thought now that his telescope had a subtle mechanical problem, as all the photographic plates taken in the same span of years (mostly since WWII) show that all the stars recorded on the plates have the same wobble.
It’s fairly likely that Barnard’s Star has at least some planets, but van de Kamp didn’t detect them.
His conclusions were tested by other astronomers, and couldn’t be reproduced using the very same data, or by re-imaging the star from different locations. That’s epitomimzes how science is supposed to work, and how scientists claim that it always does.
If it always did, the jokers pushing the AGW agenda would be out of jobs and blacklisted.
http://www.weblore.com/richard/barnard%27s_star.htma
6
posted on
10/02/2011 6:50:11 AM PDT
by
SunkenCiv
(It's never a bad time to FReep this link -- https://secure.freerepublic.com/donate/)
To: SunkenCiv
They are all “scientists”. They all make up facts to fit their theories. Just look at evolution and global warming. They are all socialist pawns used to promote hope and change for the masses.
To: SunkenCiv
Humans are causing stellar wobble!
Please donate to freerepublic.com to stop the spin!
8
posted on
10/02/2011 7:02:07 AM PDT
by
outofsalt
("If History teaches us anything it's that history rarely teaches us anything")
To: SunkenCiv
We don’t have any disagreement here. I just wanted to point out the science vs verified science aspect of exoplanet discovery. Thank you for the write-up.
Do you happen to follow the Jodcast podcast and the Starstuff podcast out of Australia? Those are two good current planetary science podcast I really enjoy - Starstuff being the better facts-based one. If you have any reading / listening list recommendations please let me know.
9
posted on
10/02/2011 7:02:48 AM PDT
by
lefty-lie-spy
(Stay metal. For the Horde \m/("_")\m/ - via iPhone from Tokyo.)
To: SunkenCiv
10
posted on
10/02/2011 7:56:24 AM PDT
by
JoeProBono
(A closed mouth gathers no feet)
To: JoeProBono
Cool! I’d go there.
Did you take that picture with a MALP sent through the Stargate? (It is real, doncha know)
11
posted on
10/02/2011 5:07:39 PM PDT
by
hattend
(If I wanted you dead, you'd be dead. - Cameron Connor)
To: hattend
12
posted on
10/02/2011 5:44:17 PM PDT
by
JoeProBono
(A closed mouth gathers no feet)
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