Glow of alien planets glimpsed at last

Glow of alien planets glimpsed at last
20:00 22 March 2005


For the first time, astronomers have seen the glow of alien planets circling sun-like stars. "This is a new era," says the leader of one of the teams, Drake Deming from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, US. "This is the first time we have actually seen light."

Although planet hunters have bagged almost 150 extrasolar planets since the first one was spotted 10 years ago, until now they have only inferred the planets' presence by measuring the wobble in the host star's orbit or the dimming of the starlight as the planet passes in front of it. No one had yet seen the light from a planet directly.

Earlier this year, Glenn Schneider of the University of Arizona in Tucson, US, and his colleagues directly saw an object that was hailed by many as an extrasolar planet. But Schneider's object, visible in infrared light, is five times as massive as Jupiter and is in orbit around a small, failed star known as a brown dwarf.

Schneider himself refuses to use the "P-word", preferring instead to call the thing a "planetary-mass object". "Everyone was calling this a planet in the press," says Schneider. "But this wouldn't form as planets do."

"Hot Jupiters"
By contrast, Deming's team and another led by David Charbonneau at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US, have each studied a planet of the class called "hot Jupiters", which orbit Sun-like stars. These gas giants probably evolved in a manner similar to those in our solar system.

The orbits of both planets, as observed from Earth, take them behind their host stars. The teams took advantage of this to tease out the planets' radiation from infrared images captured by NASA's Spitzer space telescope...>

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7186

If they are, they shuodl be used in the game I am writing

Here's how this was done by astronomers using the Spitzer space telescope according to the press release:

To distinguish this planet glow from that of the fiery hot stars, the astronomers used a simple trick. First, they used Spitzer to collect the total infrared light from both the stars and planets. Then, when the planets dipped behind the stars as part of their regular orbit, the astronomers measured the infrared light coming from just the stars. This pinpointed exactly how much infrared light belonged to the planets.

So no pictures yet...

--Peter

Edit: Exhibit A ^^^ ;) :P

Someone is bound to think they're real photos. Wish they were, but we're a looong way off from being able to produce such images...

still checking, as I am planning to use some NASA photos in the game, the ones that are open for public use... sci fi game...

http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/Media

Hang your cursor above the image.




Other Spitzer Images
http://homepage.eircom.net/~jackcelestia/browseimages/spitzer.htm