Last week it was the discovery of gravity waves, this week it’s seeing clouds on a distant planet for the first time. What an exciting time in astronomy!
In a Hubble first, UA astronomers take images of an exoplanet changing over time
By using a novel imaging technique, UA astronomers have discovered that the exoplanet known as 2M1207b rotates twice as fast as Earth and has patchy clouds
From the UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA
Using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers at the University of Arizona have taken the first direct, time-resolved images of an exoplanet. Their results were published today inThe Astrophysical Journal.
The young, gaseous exoplanet known as 2M1207b, located some 160 light-years from Earth, is four times the mass of Jupiter and orbits a failed star, known to astronomers as a brown dwarf. And while our solar system is 4.5 billion years in the making, 2M1207b is a mere ten million years old. Its days are short–less than 11 hours–and its temperature is hot–a blistering 2,600 degrees Fahrenheit. Its rain showers come in the form of liquid iron and glass.
The researchers, led by UA Department of Astronomy graduate student Yifan Zhou, were able to deduce the exoplanet’s rotational period and better understand its atmospheric properties–including its patchy clouds–by taking 160 images of the target over the course of ten hours. Their work was made possible by the high resolution and high contrast imaging capabilities of Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3.
“Understanding the exoplanet’s atmosphere was one of the key goals for us. This can help us understand how its clouds form and if they are homogenous or heterogeneous across the planet,” said Zhou.
Before now, nobody had ever used 26-year-old Hubble to create time-resolved images of an exoplanet.
Even the largest telescope on Earth could not snap a sharp photo of a planet as far away as 2M1207b, so the astronomers created an innovative, new way to map its clouds without actually seeing them in sharp relief: They measured its changing brightness over time.
Daniel Apai, UA assistant professor of astronomy and planetary sciences, is the lead investigator of this Hubble program. He said, “The result is very exciting. It gives us a new technique to explore the atmospheres of exoplanets.”
According to Apai, this new imaging technique provides a “method to map exoplanets” and is “an important step for understanding and placing our planets in context.” Our Solar System has a relatively limited sampling of planets, and there is no planet as hot or as massive as 2M1207b within it.
Steward Observatory Astronomer Glenn Schneider and Lunar and Planetary Laboratory Professor Adam Showman coauthored the study.
“2M1207b is likely just the first of many exoplanets we will now be able to characterize and map,” said Schneider.
“Do these exotic worlds have banded cloud patterns like Jupiter? How is the weather and climate on these extremely hot worlds similar to or different from that of the colder planets in our own solar system? Observations like these are key to answering these questions,” said Showman.
Zhou and his collaborators began collecting data for this project in 2014. It began as a pilot study to demonstrate that space telescopes like Hubble and the James Webb Space Telescope, which NASA will launch in late 2018, can be used to map clouds on other planets.
The success of this study lead to a new, larger program: Hubble’s Cloud Atlas program for which Apai is also the lead investigator. As one of Hubble’s largest exoplanet-focused programs, Cloud Atlas represents a collaboration between 14 experts from across the globe, who are now creating more time-resolved images of other planets using the space telescope.
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Velcro is the brainchild of Swiss electrical engineer George de Mestral who in 1941 went for a walk in the woods and wondered if the burrs that clung to his trousers — and dog — could be turned into something useful.[1]
The original patented hook and loop fastener was invented in 1948 by de Mestral, who patented it in 1955 and subsequently refined and developed its practical manufacture until its commercial introduction in the late 1950s.
De Mestral developed a fastener that consisted of two components: a lineal fabric strip with tiny hooks that could “mate” with another fabric strip with smaller loops, attaching temporarily, until pulled apart.[2] Initially made of cotton, which proved impractical,[3] the fastener was eventually constructed with nylon and polyester.[4]
De Mestral gave the name Velcro, a portmanteau of the French words velours (“velvet”), and crochet (“hook”),[5][6] to his invention.
Humphrey Cripps began investing in Velcro in the 1960s. In 2009, the company was taken private by a private equity firm linked to the Cripps family.[7][8]
In the summer of 1958 Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments found a solution to this problem. He was newly employed and had been set to work on a project to build smaller electrical circuits. However, the path that Texas Instruments had chosen for its miniaturization project didn’t seem to be the right one to Kilby.
Because he was newly employed, Kilby had no vacation like the rest of the staff. Working alone in the lab, he saw an opportunity to find a solution of his own to the miniaturization problem. Kilby’s idea was to make all the components and the chip out of the same block (monolith) of semiconductor material. When the rest of the workers returned from vacation, Kilby presented his new idea to his superiors. He was allowed to build a test version of his circuit. In September 1958, he had his first integrated circuit ready. It was tested and it worked perfectly!
Nobel Prize winner!
All I can say is WOW!
President Dwight D. Eisenhower established the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in 1958[5] with a distinctly civilian (rather than military) orientation encouraging peaceful applications in space science. The National Aeronautics and Space Act was passed on July 29, 1958, disestablishing NASA’s predecessor, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA). The new agency became operational on October 1, 1958.[6][7]
“encouraging peaceful applications in space science.” Until Jimmy Carter came along and insisted that, to save money, the shuttle would be our only means to put satellites into space – including military ones.
PTFE was accidentally discovered in 1938 by Roy Plunkett while he was working in New Jersey for DuPont. As Plunkett attempted to make a new chlorofluorocarbon refrigerant, the tetrafluoroethylene gas in its pressure bottle stopped flowing before the bottle’s weight had dropped to the point signaling “empty.” Since Plunkett was measuring the amount of gas used by weighing the bottle, he became curious as to the source of the weight, and finally resorted to sawing the bottle apart. He found the bottle’s interior coated with a waxy white material that was oddly slippery. Analysis showed that it was polymerized perfluoroethylene, with the iron from the inside of the container having acted as a catalyst at high pressure. Kinetic Chemicals patented the new fluorinated plastic (analogous to the already known polyethylene) in 1941,[2] and registered the Teflon trademark in 1945.[3][4]
Post-it note adhesive was also a failed experiment at 3M but with a twist – employee Art Fry took it upon himself to change the mind of higher-ups that the adhesive had value. He did it by in-house manufacturing a steady supply of post-it notes for 3M secretaries until they were all using them – thus convincing the nay-sayers that his product idea was a good one. http://www.snopes.com/business/origins/post-it.asp
We have a good eye in the sky, it cost mega bucks, it needed corrective glasses, more mega bucks, then some person decided it was better to look at something umpteen trillion miles away. I would like this eye in the sky to look at our neighbours so we get a better understanding of our own little cosmos.
Have these people no shame.
What?
No they have not… They are charlatans living of government handouts and tricking people by presenting their entertaining hypothesis as the “established” science…
I found a NASA presentation prepared by the UA team (Daniel Apai, Yi-Fan Zhou et al) who invented this new imaging technique which explains in some detail how it works.
asd.gsfc.nasa.gov/colloquia/luvoir/2015/Apai_ATLAST_30Sep2015.pdf
Some of the comments above have suggested that these images are merely some kind of hallucinations of an artist’s rendering of a series of brightness measurements. Actually it is more complex than that and utilizes spectral data from which the internal cloud forming processes can be inferred.
So, yes, it is a kind of ‘best-fit’ modeling of data, to create these images. Probably not unique in the sense that different models could produce different images. But certainly not an ‘artist rendering.
😐
Yes, yes…. spectral measurements…. nonlinear Schrodiner equation…. make it to appear complex to overwhelm laymen and shut the critics up… In the meantime, it’s all just a hypothesis that no one can neither confirm nor disprove.
@Walt the Physicist
Hmm, the usual formulation of Schroedinger’s equation is linear. So why introduce non-linearity, or quantum theory, for that matter, when the theory need only work as a classical linear superposition of vertical properties to facilitate the detection?
They claim the algorithm was validated using their detector on Jupiter’s Red Spot. (It’s really just a kind of ‘storm’ detector.)
I don’t see how they can do that with a single pixel of data, and don’t see how it could be any more than a single pixel.
On one of the brighter planets in the solar system, where you can get a good exposure over a shorter period, I can see how you could visualize longitudinal features, but there wouldn’t be any latitudinal information.
I remember this from 2007
https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/news/archive/2007/title,12791,en.php
Altair surface imaged, so telescope and techniques improve and astronomy progresses!
If they’d said it was suffering from global-warming then they might have got it published in Science or Nature. 🙂
I help build the Atlas V and Delta IV…..This is the kind of stuff I love to see….science discovering things.
As Geddy Lee sings….”This magic day when super-science mingles with the bright stuff of dreams”
Hey that cloud looks like an Fithp
They did not ‘image’ anything. They advanced the light curve technique so that they can extrapolate the albedo of the planet – that’s all. Which is not actually anything much new at all. There’s certainly no first to it.
Ladies and Gentlemen, let’s get real. It is my understanding that images above are fictional — they are illustrations of what an artist thinks the data in the graph might be. I do not think that they are photographs of a planet 160 light-years distant.
The data is the data — “They measured its changing brightness over time.” which they have interpreted as “banded clouds” changing the brightness as the planet revolves.
I agree, these are not photographs. Neither are they merely an artist’s rendering.
A photograph is merely a ‘reconstructed model’ of an object using an optical wavefront sensor (“lens”). It is technically feasible (using aperture synthesis) to reconstruct exoplanet images with wavefront optics, but currently not possible without constructing telescopes with planet-sized apertures. Such telescopes would likely be able to capture features which change relatively slowly over time from most exoplanets (including the smaller ones we can’t even see yet)
In the meantime these lightcurve techniques are a viable workaround. So these “lightcurve” exoplanet images are reconstructed models of atmospheric clouds using multi-spectral optical sensors, which operate by inferring the cloud-generating processes using spectral properties of the received photons.
Here is a description of how it works. It reconstructs the cloud dynamics of these planetary gas giants with surprising accuracy.
http://asd.gsfc.nasa.gov/colloquia/luvoir/2015/Apai_ATLAST_30Sep2015.pdf
Note slides #46ff, where Jupiter is used to calibrate this “lightcurving” technique, even reconstructing the Red Spot. “MCMC-based Light Curve Mapping Tool Validated on Jupiter” (Karalidi)
I think that’s impressive.
… Another way to think of this imaging technique would be as a “storm detector”, i.e. a way to detect the vertical structure of atmospheric clouds along with the longitudinal structure. This is inferred from inhomogeneous spectral features of the clouds. (See slide #21)
So what would it detect if pointed to an “earth-like” planet? Maybe a Cat 5 hurricane lumbering across the planet.
@me
“I agree, these are not photographs. Neither are they merely an artist’s rendering. ”
Actually, I’m wrong. The “banded” planetary image at the top of this post is in fact an artist’s rendering. Indeed it is titled “Artist’s view of super Jupiter …”
http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2016/05/image/a/
I was conflating this with the presentation slides I found prepared by the same author (Apai) which described a technique, validate on Jupiter, for detecting storms on exoplanets, using spectral features to infer vertical structure of the atmosphere.
The Zhou-Apai paper at the Hubble site describes how they deduced the rotational period from a modulation in the detected, enhanced image of the exoplanet (2m1207b), which can be resolved by the Hubble from the main brown dwarf star (2m1207a)
http://i67.tinypic.com/2r6oeo1.png
The pure yellow blob in the right image is the exoplanet, as resolved by Hubble, with an apparent diameter of several pixels.
That is just the planet’s disk convolved with the point-spread function (PSF) of the telescope, not the true image of the planet, which would be less than a pixel in diameter. By deconvolving and oversampling the resulting image over time, the researchers were able to detect sinusoidal modulation, which they determined was a feature of the planet, not the telescope or observation process, which represented atmospheric features rising and setting on the planet. From this they deduced a rotation period of about 10.7 hours.
Not clear how they deduced the ‘patchy’ nature of the clouds over this planet from this paper. Apparently they’re not the first to directly image this exoplanet, but is considered a notable achievement in that it involves isolating and extracting planetary features by enhancing the contrast of the planetary image by removing some of the overlapping PSF from the host brown dwarf.
It seems that the true achievement here is simply that they are able to 1) Detect such a small change in light from a planet so far away and 2) Detect the change well enough to establish periodicity. The rest is all spin…
“…and are there any more questions?”
“Yes, may we see the image?”
“Well, there’s not actually an image…”
As for the joker who pooh-poohed the development of space travel, I will offer “spy satellites” as a very pertinent motive (operating in secret during the early 60s). It enabled an accurate assessment of Soviet ICBM capability, essential to establishing our own defense posture and allowing us to prevail in the Cold War. Early warning satellites in geostationary orbit were also important pillars of our defense posture. A further push in the direction of the Strategic Defense Initiative was instrumental in convincing the Politburo that they could not win a Cold War based on technological competition. (This was also the subtext purpose of the Apollo program.) End result: we win the Cold War without raising the temperature.
Hopefully they don’t try to model it’s climate !
No they won’t. They are shysters but not stupids! Next they might study the patterns of “cloud” formation and “demonstrate” that the seasons exist on this planet… Just like on Earth, sigh….
Sorry if this has been covered before – don’t have time to read through the comments – but every knows that the image shown (not by the original poster, but the original authors) is more than a bit misleading because one gets the impression the “image” of the planet is either that or something similar. The actual “image” can be seen in Figure 1 here:
http://www.slideshare.net/sacani/discovery-of-rotational-modulations-in-the-planetary-mass-companion-2m1207b-intermediate-rotation-period-and-heterogeneous-clouds-in-a-low-gravity-atmosphere
It’s an amazing scientific accomplishment, but what they did and what made it into the “press release” bear little similarity.