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Astronomers know of thousands of planets around other stars, yet only a handful have been imaged directly. The existence of the rest is inferred by how they affect their stars.
Now the world's largest optical telescope has directly spied a new planetary system—the first time more than one planet has been imaged around a star like our Sun. Astronomers used the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (VLT) to observe the Sun-like star TYC 8998-760-1, 300 light-years from Earth. Using the VLT's Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast Exoplanet Research (SPHERE) instrument, which is equipped with an optical mask called a coronagraph to block out a star's light, they were able to see two planets orbiting it [pictured here], as reported today in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. Some light from the star can be seen in the image above (center left) as well as the two giant planets (right) and a scattering of background stars.
The star system is very young at 17 million years old.
Also at AstronomyNow.
Journal Reference:
Alexander J. Bohn, Matthew A. Kenworthy, Christian Ginski, et al. Two Directly Imaged, Wide-orbit Giant Planets around the Young, Solar Analog TYC 8998-760-1 - IOPscience, The Astrophysical Journal Letters (DOI: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/aba27e)
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday July 24 2020, @08:09PM
Well, the Fenachrone were reported to use space based telescopes with a five mile diameter, and see any planet in the galaxy. This was fiction, and is clearly wrong if only because of dust clouds, but...
Optical interferometry is now a real thing. With a bit of improvement you could use pulsars to synchronize the timing. Put a large telescope (for quantity of light collected) at opposite poles of Neptune's orbit. That would give you a bit of parallax. Ideally you'd want one more equally far from the sun, but above or below the plane of the ecliptic. You could probably make a 3-D movie of anything facing you, though there'd be a lot of post-processing needed.
So. How much can we see without leaving the home system...well, quite a lot, actually, if we really put our effort behind it. The images within the galaxy would probably be limited by quantity of light collected rather than the ability to focus closely. Five mile telescopes kept accurate to 1/4 wavelength are really beyond the state of the art once you get much shorter than radio wave lengths. You'd need excruciatingly good temperature control on that mirror AT ALL TIMES. But with good enough interferometry you could combine several smaller telescopes to achieve the same light collecting power. More telescopes, though, over a larger distance, makes focus trickier.
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