BEHOLD

how come the planets are so bright and huge?

>>8632544
the star's light is blocked out?

>>8632569
yes. to a distance well beyond where the possible rocky inner planets would possibly be observed. glare of many months/years at different angles and weather condiitons. From what i udnerstand every artificially dark/black area is to block the glare.

>>8632579
the 4 planets seen would be likely representative of the gas giants that are typically in the outer reaches of system formation. The inner rocky planets could possibly be seen with stronger instrumentation from a space telescope.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HR_8799

So we have light from them? Anything interesting about their composition?

>>8632601
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HR_8799#Planet_spectra

>>8632539
what is this recorded with a potato ?

>>8632539
why do the planets dim and then brighten again?
what's that mess of pixels around the star that sort of pulsates?

>>8632539
That's really cool, but that's also a 6-year span with such little revolution. We're not seeing earth-sized planets here, are we, more likely gas giants at great distance from the star?
This is still a pretty neat step, just like the imaging of the stars whipping around SagA*.

How many years until we have telescopes powerful enough to directly image individual craters on Earth-sized planets 100ly away?

>>8632631
>why do they dim and brighten again
Hundreds of images taken over 6 years. It could by anything from minute differences in focus and exposure, to differences in that star's solar cycles.
The pulsing lights around the blacked-out star are likely the sun's corona across 6 years as it ebbs and flares, or slight glare caused by the black-out disc being placed ever-so-slightly off-center in successive images.

>>8632539
Also, judging by the 20au scale indicator, it looks like the little yellow star they use to indicate the star's location is also coincidentally about the same size as the Earth-Sun orbit would be, or possibly closer to the Earth-Mars orbit. A little rocky planet could be right in that tiny area there, whipping around the star six times in the span of that gif.

I just found that cool.

>imaging

Imagining.

>>8632539
What's the sauce nigger?

>>8632837
the actual astonomers who's name were on the gif posted them somewhere on reddit. Talked about their work.
>inb4 go back

How big is this star compared to our sun?

Those orbits seem to be incredibly slow, but this is still fascinating. The distance is 20 AU, from what I remember in basic astronomy, AU is the distance from Earth to the Sun, right? So these planets are much further out, similar to our gas giants then, correct?

Still, this shit is fucking fascinating. I can't believe we live in the day and age where we can literally image other planets in other solar systems with instrumentation.

>>8632668
It would be cool if the variations in brightness were due to moons orbiting the planets.

>>8632849
that first photos were in 2009, but the bulk started in 2012 i think.
>>8632853
anon, they are "barely" able to pick up the glare of a jupiter/saturn sized planet from out of the corona/glare of the overall star. If you look on the wiki the unassistsed photos look just like a star, they had to use advanced imaging techniques to even tell there were planets there just a few years ago... and luckily they assumed they'd be able to bring them out in the wash. They started taking the pictures before they could see a planet in the pictures.

>>8632849
orbital periods are 45, 100, 190, and 460 years. Thus having a decade or so just to take pictures wouldn't be enough to show a full rotation for a single one of them.

>>8632861
>>8632858
That's insane, how we can know so much about these star systems from such little information and just a few years studying them.

Can't they measure the composition of the planets too by studying the light and looking at absorption / emission spectrums?

>>8632539
>This is kind of a major deal
No shit Sherlock, since it is the first stellar system to be imaged outside Earth's solar system.
Those four planets appear to be hot super-Jovians, which is fckn awesome if you think about it.

>>8633071
No, there are dozens now. And no, these planets are far from their star.

>>8632866
you can measure their periods with this gif and middle school math...

File: 1484013525498.jpg (50KB, 417x356px) Image search: [Google]

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ok this is all cool and dandy but
WHERE ARE THE AYYY LMAOS

>>8633082
Wouldn't super-Jovians practically be Brown Dwarfs, and thus relatively hot from their own internal pressure? If Jupiter were just 10% bigger, it would be a brown dwarf as well.

>>8632539
>Ayyliums might be looking at us the same way RIGHT NOW

File: 1484323318800.gif (2MB, 695x392px) Image search: [Google]

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>>8633157
I suppose if there was something super out of the ordinary we'd have detected that before this - like a dyson sphere.
>>8633565
you'd need 13 more Jupiters to get a brown dwarf with sustaining fusion. Heres an entire article speculating on the different star sizes and jupiter.
https://phys.org/news/2014-02-jupiter-star.html
>>8633659
I think it's just us anon

>>8632866
They are just guessing 100%, you can be super specific in your fantasies when noone can actually go there to contradict you

It's like when geologists talk about the composition of the earth, and every time they drill down they realize they are all wrong

>>8634003
what did he mean by this?

>>8632866
https://youtu.be/UfJ-i4Y6DGU
you can tell what's in the atmosphere from the light it reflects to your telescope.

File: 14851124703090.jpg (78KB, 750x653px) Image search: [Google]

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>This image is from the KECK observatory

>>8634117
It's actually from Gemini South.

>>8633565
A "hot Jupiter" is a planet with similar mass to Jupiter that is very close to the host star. It's hot because it's close in, not because it makes it's own heat.

>>8634003
No they're not guessing. People have developed Bayesian methods for estimating the atmospheric composition so they never say more than what the data says.

File: 14645241654.jpg (140KB, 768x1114px) Image search: [Google]

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>>8633082
>dozens
>plural
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_directly_imaged_exoplanets
>22 directly imaged
That would make your claim of the plural dozens technically incorrect. The best kind of incorrect.