It's Official: Astronomers Caught The First-Ever Direct Picture of a Planet Being Born
For the very first time, astronomers have captured an image of a baby planet as it carves a path through the disc of dust that surrounds its star, an orange dwarf 113.4 parsecs (370 light-years) away from Earth.
[...] PDS 70 has a few features that made it a good candidate for this sort of search. Its protoplanetary disc is large, spanning a radius of around 130 astronomical units (the distance between Earth and the Sun; the Kuiper belt only goes up to about 50 au).
[...] Using its coronagraph and polarisation filters, the [Very Large Telescope] team discovered a very large planet orbiting in the gap in PDS 70's protoplanetary disc - which means it's probably still in the process of accumulating material. Further analysis of the planet, described in a second paper, was conducted based on its spectrum. Its mass is several times that of Jupiter, and its orbit is around 22 AU, just a little bit farther than Uranus's orbit around the Sun. It takes about 120 Earth years to complete one orbit around its star, and its surface temperature is around 1,200 Kelvin.
PDS 70. Also at ESO and Syfy Wire.
Discovery of a planetary-mass companion within the gap of the transition disk around PDS 70
Orbital and atmospheric characterization of the planet within the gap of the PDS 70 transition disk
Related Stories
Telescope array will spy on spy satellites, star surfaces and black holes
At a time when astronomers are building billion-dollar telescopes with mirrors 30 meters across, the 1.4-meter instrument being installed this month atop South Baldy Mountain in New Mexico may seem like a bit player. But over the next few years, nine more identical telescopes will join it on the grassy, 3200-meter summit, forming a Y-shaped array that will surpass any other optical telescope in its eye for detail. When it's complete around 2025, the $200 million Magdalena Ridge Observatory Interferometer (MROI) will have the equivalent resolution of a gigantic telescope 347 meters across.
MROI's small telescopes can't match the light-gathering power of its giant cousins, so it will be limited to bright targets. But by combining light from the spread-out telescopes, it is expected to make out small structures on stellar surfaces, image dust around newborn stars, and peer at supermassive black holes at the center of some galaxies. It will even be able to make out details as small as a centimeter across on satellites in geosynchronous orbit, 36,000 kilometers above Earth, enabling it to spy on spy satellites.
That's one reason why the U.S. Air Force, which wants to monitor its own orbital assets and presumably those of others, is funding MROI. "They want to know: Did the boom break or did some part of the photovoltaic panels collapse?" says Michelle Creech-Eakman, an astronomer at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology in Socorro and project scientist on MROI. But if the facility succeeds, its biggest impact could be on the field of astronomy, by drawing new attention to the promise of optical interferometry, a powerful but challenging strategy for extracting exquisitely sharp images from relatively small, cheap telescopes.
Wikipedia article on Astronomical Optical Interferometry.
Related: Very Large Telescope's MUSE Instrument Studies the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field
Very Large Telescope's ESPRESSO Combines Light From All Four Unit Telescopes for the First Time
Very Large Telescope Captures First Direct Image of a Planet Being Formed
Submitted via IRC for Fnord666
If Lowell Observatory's Gerard van Belle gets his way, you'll soon be watching an exoplanet cross the face of its star, hundreds of light-years from the Earth. He can't show you that right now, but he should be able to when the new mirrors are installed at the Navy Precision Optical Interferometer in northern Arizona. They're arriving now and should soon start collecting starlight—and making it the highest-resolution optical telescope in the world.
Van Belle recently showed Ars around the gigantic instrument, which bears almost no resemblance to what a non-astronomer pictures when they hear the word "telescope." There are a couple of more traditional telescopes in dome-topped silos on site, including one built in 1920s in Ohio, where it spent the first few decades of its life.
The best way to improve imagery on these traditional scopes is to increase the diameter of the mirror catching light. But this has its limits—perfect mirrors can only be built so large.
[...] A bigger mirror provides two advantages: it catches more light (making fainter objects visible) and it produces a higher-resolution image. If you give up on the first advantage, you can go all in on the second by laying out a handful of small mirrors over a considerable distance. The total mirror area (and therefore light collection) won't be that great, but the tremendous diameter of the array cranks the resolution up to 11. That's the principle behind the Navy Precision Optical Interferometer, a Y-shaped installation with a functional diameter of up to 430 meters.
Source: https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/07/meet-the-telescope-that-may-soon-show-you-an-exo-eclipse/
Related: Very Large Telescope Interferometer Captures Best Ever Image of Another Star (Antares)
Very Large Telescope's MUSE Instrument Studies the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field
Very Large Telescope's ESPRESSO Combines Light From All Four Unit Telescopes for the First Time
High-Resolution View Into The Infrared Universe
Very Large Telescope Captures First Direct Image of a Planet Being Formed
Magdalena Ridge Observatory Interferometer Will Have Resolution of a 347-Meter Telescope for $200m
The Swarm Telescope Concept
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 02 2018, @11:37PM
That's Michael David Crawford's Mother. She's accumulating gold to pay rent for little mikey's storage units full of priceless antique heirlooms while little mikey lives in a tent out in the backyard and pretends to be poor.
(Score: 0, Redundant) by aristarchus on Tuesday July 03 2018, @02:07AM (3 children)
"I just love it when a planet comes together!"
Or, alternatively,
"Is that a proto-planetary disk, or are you just . . . " Never mind.
(Score: -1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 03 2018, @02:12AM (2 children)
Ancient greek philosophers should refrain from making jokes at wee hours, them jokes turn piss-poor.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 03 2018, @03:56AM (1 child)
It's only wee hours where we live. Plenty of other people are being encouraged by these jokes before having to take on life's challenges. Mostly by feeling better about themselves after seeing such a display of humor.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 03 2018, @07:04AM
High noon, where I am! Or at least it was recently. Sun ever the yard-arm, and Trump is in his cups, If he had any cups. He has all the best cups. Incredible cups. Sort of like the cups the mess up my print jobs on a regular basis,
(Score: 3, Interesting) by FatPhil on Tuesday July 03 2018, @08:22AM (4 children)
But I'm still not happy - I need the animation, I want to see what several years, or decades, of sweeping can do.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday July 03 2018, @08:36AM (2 children)
Careful with that investment of yours, you'll need it to last for some hundreds of millions of years to see something noticeable - at 120years per sweep, a few terrestrial decades mean nothing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1) by Muad'Dave on Tuesday July 03 2018, @08:53AM
> I want to see what several years, or decades, of sweeping can do.
To see what many billions of years of sweeping looks like, step outside and look down.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday July 03 2018, @10:43AM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday July 03 2018, @02:32PM
It reminds me of these:
https://www.eurekalert.org/multimedia/pub/155180.php [eurekalert.org]
https://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1741/ [eso.org]
Although comparatively it is much more intuitive to understand what is happening in the PDS 70b image.
The good news is that the first of the extremely large telescope class [wikipedia.org] will be coming online fairly soon, namely the Giant Magellan Telescope (24.5 meter aperture) in 2023 and Extremely Large Telescope (39.3 meter) in 2024.
Unfortunately, ELT is a massive downgrade on what could have been:
Note that ELT's construction budget is about €1 billion. So for an estimated 50% more cost, and far under the budget of something like JWST, a telescope with about 8 times the light collecting area could have been built.
As good as adaptive optics have made ground telescopes, the future belongs to space telescopes. With increased payload sizes and new foldable designs, we could see something like the Kilometer Space Telescope [nasa.gov] go up, which would likely be impractical on the ground.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]