I'm sure some of you heard already, but for those who didn't, there was a major breakthrough in Astronomy last week. Last Thursday, scientist released first ever images of planets outside of our solar system!
Published in the journal Science, four papers detailed many of the techniques used to find these planets. To detect planets, scientists would find the change in brightness of a star and determine if a Jupiter size object in front of the star caused it. That method can only infer that a gas giant is orbiting a star, which they couldn't see because of the brightness.
In the Hubble space telescope image, seen above, astronomers came up with a clever idea to see the planet. They used Hubble's coronagraph, which blocks out the light emitted for the star, to capture a picture of the faint planet.
Although this is a huge breakthrough, the scientists main goal is the find earth-sized planets.
How cool would that be!
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment