A 12-year telescope sequence captures four giant exoplanets orbiting their star
A 12-year sequence of telescope images of a star and four planets orbiting
Astronomer Paul Byrne shared a 12-year sequence of real telescope images showing four exoplanets, each more massive than Jupiter, slowly orbiting a star 133 light-years away. The time-lapse turns years of observations into visible planetary motion, offering a direct look at worlds beyond our solar system.
This will never stop blowing my mind. A 12-year sequence of real telescope images of a star 133 lightyears away. And around it, four planets slowly orbiting.
- 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.
- 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.
- desireco42
So all we have to do is send telescope right up and let it record...
- 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.