The very first image of a planet orbiting a star other than the Sun has been confirmed. They really did it; they bagged a planet!
I won’t keep you in suspense: here is the picture:
The planet is the red fuzzy blob to the lower left of the blue fuzzy blob. The blue blob is the parent star, and is a brown dwarf, a very low-mass star (it looks blue because this is a false-color image). The planet has about 5 times Jupiter’s mass, well within the range of being a planet and way too low to be even a brown dwarf, let alone a star. It orbits the star at about 1.5 times the distance Pluto orbits from the Sun. The two are close by as these things go: just 70 parsecs (230 light years) from here.
So how do we know that’s a planet? Ah, it’s a fine story to tell. Have a seat and get comfy; this’ll take a while.
We’ve known about other planets for some time now. The first were discovered in 1990, orbiting, of all things, a pulsar, a dead star. These are pretty interesting planets, given their circumstances, but they are not orbiting a sunlike star (though I highly recommend reading the story behind the discovery, it’s a grand tale, full of real science and real scientists).
The first planets orbiting stars like the Sun were found in 1995. They were not seen directly, but only through their influence on their parent star. A star, of course, has lots of gravity, so the planet orbits the star in a big circle (or ellipse). But the planet has gravity too, which tugs on the star. It’s like two people, one big and one small, locking hands and swinging around each other. The little one makes a big circle, and the big one makes a little circle.
As the star moves, this motion is betrayed through the Doppler shift, the same effect that makes a race car go “EEEEEEEEooooooowwwwwwwrrrrrrrrrrr” as it zips past you. When the star moves toward us in its tiny orbit around the planet (if you want to think of it that way), the Doppler shift means its light gets a wee bit bluer. When it moves away from us, the light gets a bit redder. This shift is incredibly small, and takes fantastically sensitive instruments to detect it. That technology only became available 10 years ago, and we’ve come pretty far: over 150 planets have been found this way.
While this is fantastic, it still leaves us semi-evolved apes dissatisfied: we want to see something! Those detections come about as plots of sine waves and wiggly lines.
I wanna see a planet!
Heehee. Now I can. This is so cool!
OK, I got distracted there. Back to the story.
There has been something of a race to get the first image of a planet around another star. I played a minor role in this race. When I worked on a camera onboard Hubble, we wondered if we could image a planet orbiting the nearest sunlike star, Alpha Centauri. I wrote some programs to simulate how the camera worked, and I determined that we might, might, just barely, detect one if the conditions were just so. But it would have been an extremely difficult observation, and we couldn’t convince the folks who controlled Hubble to do the observation– I really don’t blame them, given how monumentally hard this observation would have been , for so low a chance of success. We did search other, nearby stars, and never found one (duh, or else I wouldn’t be writing this blog entry now; I’d have written it years ago!).
Well, then came images from an infrared camera on Hubble. Looking for planets in the IR is good. Stars are bright, so bright that they totally drown out the feeble light from a planet. In visible light, that is. In the infrared, planets are much brighter, and stars dimmer. Instead of being a billion times brighter (as Alpha Cen was over any hypothetical planet I tried to simulate), in the IR stars might only be thousands of times brighter. That’s still a lot, but easier to deal with.
My friend Glenn Schneider had some intriguing data from the IR camera, showing a dim star (for the record, it was called TWA 6, because it’s part of a loose group of young stars called the TW Hydrae Association), with another, dimmer star next to it. The colors of the object were consistent with it being a planet. Had he found a planet orbiting another star? He couldn’t be sure, because it might be a background star masquerading as a planet. He needed proof.
The only way to know was to either wait a year to see if the two objects moved across the sky together (more on that in a moment, because it’s crucial to our tale), or to take a spectrum, break the light up into its colors like a rainbow. By doing that, you can tell the difference between a planet and a star.
So Glenn used the camera I worked on to take spectra, and asked me to help analyze the data. I spent months slaving over that data. Months! But the goal was sweet: to have proof of the first image of an alien world orbiting a far off star…
Other people (like my friend Eliot Malumuth) worked hard on the data too, but in the end we just couldn’t do it. The star’s light was swamping the fainter light from the other object. Dejected, we gave up. Turns out, later, follow-up observations showed it was a background star. Oh well.
How did we know it wasn’t a planet? Let’s back up a sec. The Milky Way Galaxy is a collection of hundreds of billions of stars (and clouds of dust and gas and other junk) in the shape of a flattened disk. The stars orbit the center, and that includes the Sun. Even at 200 km/sec, it takes about 240 million years to circle the Galaxy once. Yikes.
But other stars orbit at different speeds. So over years, we see the stars in the sky move with respect to each other. We call this their “proper motion” (I wrote a web page about this, with a Hubble picture showing this motion for a nearby star). So if you take an image of a star, wait some time, and take another one, you can detect this motion. See where this is going (har har)?
If we see a blip of light near a star, it might be a background star. So we wait a while, and then take another picture. If the nearby star moves a lot with respect to the other blip of light, chances are that blip is a star much farther away. If it were planet, it would share its stars motion across the sky.
With Glenn’s star, it turned out that the later observations showed the two objects not to be moving together. They were unassociated, and we didn’t have a planet.
Fast forward five years or so, to 2004…
Last year, a team led by astronomer Gael Chauvin used the prosaically-named Very Large Telescope in Chile, and they spotted something interesting. Near a faint red star called 2M1207 (ironically, in the TW Hydrae association!) was a fainter, even redder blip of light. Hmmm…they got a spectrum, and it sure looked like a young planet, still hot from its formation, but they couldn’t be positively, absolutely sure. The only way to confirm whether it was a planet or not was to wait, and get more images later. Then they could see if the two blips moved together.
Fast forward again, to April 2005…
Hey, that’s now!
Success!
The image above (clicking it takes you to a 220kb higher-res image) shows the proof. The blue line is the motion of the planet relative to the star if it’s not a planet, and the flat red line is if it really is a planet, moving with the star. Note the points on the plot– they are smack dab on the red line.
The two blips moved together. That means the last bit of doubt is gone. They did it! I now pronounce you star and planet. In fact, the star needs a name change: it’s now called 2M1207A. The planet is 2M1207b (stars are upper case, planets are lower case, so that’s not a typo).
My sincere and very exuberant congratulations to Gael Chauvin and his team who made this incredible image. Look at it! Sure, it’s young, only about 8 million years old (compared to 4.5 billion for the Earth), and it’s still so hot that water in its atmosphere is still steam. And sure, it’ll take a few million years to cool off, and even then it’ll be a gas giant probably much like Jupiter.
But it’s a planet. And you can see it.
As our technology gets better, we’ll find lower and lower mass planets. Then there may well be a quantum leap: NASA plans on building space telescopes which can image planets the size of Earth, normal, mature planets, just like Earth, if they’re out there.
I think they are, and I think we’ll see them. I wonder. My daughter is nine years old. By the time she’s in college, taking an astronomy class — will her professor show her an image of a world with blue oceans, green and brown continents, white clouds… orbiting Alpha Centauri?
April 29th, 2005 at 10:11 pm
I wonder how long it will take for the woo-woo crowd to take this as a “vindication” of the truth of UFOs. I’ll keep watch on the fringe.
April 29th, 2005 at 10:12 pm
Wow BA, that was very nicely written! Thanks for explaining it so well.
April 30th, 2005 at 2:59 am
Oh nice. I was wondering when they’d get one on film. Now that we have one, I suppose there will be a flood, like after they first detected a planet around another star. Good times.
April 30th, 2005 at 3:01 am
A few hundred years ago, people just assumed there might be planets out there, and even life on them (it was even mentioned in theology). Then for some years now, people have been thinking: We have no proof of other planets and other life forms, so it can’t exist. Now we have seen a planet. Fantastic!
Regarding UFOs, I still listen to Enrico Fermi (”But where are they?”).
April 30th, 2005 at 11:28 am
First exoplanet image. Ever.
Bad Astronomy Blog » Blog Archive » FIRST EXOPLANET IMAGE CONFIRMED!
> The very first image of a planet orbiting a star other than the Sun has been confirmed. They really did it; they bagged a planet!
Go look at it now. Excellent explanation…
April 30th, 2005 at 2:35 pm
The last couple of years have rekindled my love of space exploration. So many amazing images from and revelations about mars, the Titan lander and now this: we’ve seen a world outside the solar sytem. Amazing news. Thanks for the very well written piece that communicated the science and the sense of wonder.
April 30th, 2005 at 3:06 pm
A great discovery. I’m actually real happy! Me too, I wasn’t satisfied with just the “we detect them thanks to the movement of the star…”, I wanted to SEE the thing!
We’re a very visual species, most likely.
April 30th, 2005 at 6:05 pm
Thanks. Important news. I heard your announcement on George Noory’s show last night. Of course, then Richard C. Hoaxland had to call in and try to downplay the importance. Coast to Coast needs some flake removers.
April 30th, 2005 at 9:04 pm
If its anything like the Sid Meyer’s game, it’ll be green oceans…
May 1st, 2005 at 7:22 am
This doesn’t have anything to do with the article itself, just the bit about a planet in Alpha Centauri.
Now, correct me if I’m wrong, but I was under the impression that it was physically impossible for a binary system to have a planet in a stable orbit. And Alpha Centauri is a binary (well, technically a trinary, but the third star is so small and far away from the other two it doesn’t really matter) system.
May 1st, 2005 at 7:54 am
It seems to be possible…
http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_astro/answers/980122c.html
http://www32.brinkster.com/snefru/space/binary/contents.htm
http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/AJ/journal/issues/v117n1/980335/980335.html
May 2nd, 2005 at 2:22 am
Wow that is one big article! Awesome though!
So cool
May 2nd, 2005 at 4:43 am
Wow, that’s incredible news. Really interesting. ^_^
I wonder what the astrologers will (have to) make of a confirmed new planet? =P
May 2nd, 2005 at 7:33 am
Stars are bright, so bright that they totally drown out the feeble light from a planet. In visible light, that is. In the infrared, planets are much brighter, and stars dimmer. Instead of being a billion times brighter, […] in the IR stars might only be thousands of times brighter.
Why is that? I thought warmer objects radiated more in infrared, and stars are clearly warmer than planets…. Just curious.
May 2nd, 2005 at 8:40 am
Wiz, SWAG, heat emitted in infrared is just heat being dissipated as EM in one wavelength band. The hotter the object doing the emitting, the higher the band (i.e. longer the wavelength). So when objects get hot enough, they emit more energy in higher bands, giving off light, and so less in lower wavelengths, IR.
“Coast to Coast needs some flake removers.” Starting from the top - Art Bell, George Noory, et al.
May 2nd, 2005 at 9:02 am
[…] Bad Astronomy Blog » Blog Archive » FIRST EXOPLANET IMAGE CONFIRMED! Bad Astronomy Blog » Blog Archive » FIRST EXOPLANET IMAGE CONFIRMED! This is really really cool. I&# […]
May 2nd, 2005 at 10:12 am
Wiz, Irishman was close, but a tad confused.
Any object gives off light. The kind of light depends on its temperature. A warm object (like an oven, a planet, a human) gives off light mostly in the infrared (though also at lower energy = longer wavelength = lower frequency). As an object gets hotter, the predominant light it gives off gets higher energy. So a star gives off most of its light in the visible, and less in infrared. A planet gives off no visible light (they’re bright because they *reflect* light)., but lots of infrared. The star still gives off more, but the ratio of star to planet is usually much lower in infrared than in visible.
These might help: http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/misc/starcolors.html and http://www.badastronomy.com/mad/1996/wien.html
May 2nd, 2005 at 11:25 am
Wow, this is great news! I wasn’t expecting this so soon. I read that between the original announcement and this confirmation there have been a couple of other possible planet sightings, so it looks like jt-3d may very well be right. Especially considering we have a better idea what to look for now.
As for planets around binary stars, take a look at this site:
http://burtleburtle.net/bob/physics/binary.html
It has some great java orbit simulations. That particular link shows a number of stable orbits around binary stars, but the page has a bunch of other interesting orbits as well.
May 2nd, 2005 at 3:03 pm
> It seems to be possible…
everytime somebody tells you that something is “impossible” just show them a picture of Saturn’s rings
May 2nd, 2005 at 3:12 pm
[…] lanet orbiting a star other than the Sun for the first time. Bad Astronomy Blog has a good explanation of how we know it’s a planet and all that. Pretty cool.
No Comments &raqu […]
May 3rd, 2005 at 8:46 am
Great news Philip. I can’t wait to share it with my students in Science. This question of “Do we have a picture of another planet?” comes up every year and now I can show them one.
This is so cool. I tell my own children the things they will see in their lifetimes will be amazing. Great article and well explained, thanks!
Brad
May 4th, 2005 at 1:46 am
“Quantum leap”? So that means it is a really small discovery?
May 4th, 2005 at 5:25 am
I think is awsom that we knoow for sure that we can actualy see another salestial body orbeting a stare instead of a strange nios from a radio teliscope
May 4th, 2005 at 5:51 am
I just love this
Makes me whant to be re-borned in about 2105…and se were this is realy going.
May 4th, 2005 at 8:45 am
Interesting as this may be. (And indeed, it IS very interesting!)
I really don’t know if many Earthlike planets can be found, no matter what technology one uses. Because I don’t think there will be all that many.
I don’t doubt that terrestrial worlds will be found. They may even be quite common. But looking at the exoplanets so far discovered, it seems that the norm so far is systems with ‘heavy jupiters’ in eccentric orbits normally associated with comets, rogue asteroids and Pluto.
And though I certainly won’t rule out the possibility of promising worlds, I personally think most rocky worlds will probably just follow the same rule and be in weird orbits, that aren’t particularly friendly to life as we know it.
And then there is also the fact that many of these promising worlds may be moons of Jupiter-weight, or heavier gas-giants. (If these are in a promising orbit to begin with.) And would these be detectable at all?
I think Astronomy is hugely fascinating, and I’ve used a telescope myself to look at the Moon, Jupiter etc. But when it comes to finding life, the theme has always been consistent disappointment in the end. (Just think of all the attempts to find life in the solar system. Venus… Mars… etc. And personally, the most scientists seem to dare to hope for on Europa seems to be microbes. (And I’d have to see it first.) And even if there where microbes, this might be interesting to folks like me, but the public will probably find it less then riveting. (Do they know for example about the unusual microbes in say… lake Vostok, Antarctica? Have they even HEARD about lake Vostok?)
In addition, even if we do find earthlike worlds, we can’t quite do anything with them. Whilst the public will find that interesting, obviously. I doubt it will result in much. Freezing people doesn’t seem to be possible. And I think a generationship is a horrible idea. People being born and dying in an artificial area, with their only purpose being to bring forth next generations till a few people can finally reach a system? No… Bad idea… And we couldn’t communicate with these colonist anyways if we could get them there. (To Alpha Centauri alone it would take four years just for a radiomessage to arrive.)
I’m not saying the money shouldn’t be spent. If there is a shortage, the US could shave money of its preposterously huge military budget. (400 Billion and upped to 420 Billion under Bush per year, as opposed to say… 70 Billion for Russia, 50 Billion for China and less then a full Billion for these so called ‘Axis of Evil’ folks even a their peak.) There are more practical causes perhaps, but its still a good cause.
But I personally wouldn’t expect to much to rejoice about.
I don’t want to be like the types in the past who used to say that things like electricity or personal computers where impossible or unfeasable. But far as practical uses go, I’d be (pleasantly) surprised if they built some viable manned operation on even the moon, by the time I’m old. (And I’m in my mid-twenties.)
So all in all… photo’s of Earthlike worlds.. If you actually manage to get some, bring them on. But I don’t expect them. And if they are made, the photo will probably be all we’ll get within our lifespan. (Barring any breakthroughs to drastically enhance said lifespan.)
May 4th, 2005 at 10:14 am
I just wanted to say a huge thank you for this blog. I’ve been lurking since you announced it in your BA newsletter, and I love dropping by to see what’s new. I wouldn’t even consider myself an amateur astronomer - hard to do practical astronomy when you’re occassionally agoraphobic and mildly afraid of the dark. I love the theoretical side of things, though, and you have a wonderful way of explaining them.
Bravo!
May 4th, 2005 at 9:37 pm
So, if I’m understanding this right, we are pretty much looking at the planet as it appears today, give or take. It’s not “looking into the past” as Hubble like to do. We are looking 230 years into the past, right?
Great explanation. Good for a lay(wo)man!
May 6th, 2005 at 11:15 am
Mick,
Your viewpoint seems just a little shortsighted to me. The reason that only massive super-Jupiter-like planets have been found so far is because those are exactly the type of planets that current technology would be expected to pick up first. Extremely massive worlds produce the biggest effect on their parent stars (large planets are easier to find, small planets are hard to find). Plus those planets with larger surface area also reflect back more radiation (that’s why Jupiter is so much brighter than Mars even though it’s farther away) and thus you would expect that a very large world would have been the first to be imaged. No one expects you to find Pluto with your telescope before you find Saturn.
There is no reason to assume that super-massive planets make up a majority of planets in the galaxy because for right now all of our intruments are biased towards detecting the large stuff and miss most of the smaller stuff. Currently NASA does have on the books a more highly resolved planet-finder telescope which should have the capability to detect smaller rocky worlds. So in the spirit of skeptisicm I’d hope that you reserve drawing absolute conclusions until the range of observations have been tested in order to confirm or deny your opinion.
I’m sorry that technology hasn’t met your wish for instant gratification in this field. The universe never gives up its secrets without a good fight and we’re doing the best we can. There are certain absolute limits on our abilities as mortals in this universe and if we can’t retrieve information from other worlds faster than the speed of light or within the scope of a human lifespan then other ways have to be found. If a candidate for possible alien life on another world were possible what practical time-limit would you advise is impractical for sending a probe? A 20 year round trip? 50, 150, 300, 1,000 years? Can you imagine the impact such a discovery would make to the society of the future if they could thank us for sending out a probe now which could bring them proof of alien life in their time?
And let’s not get too ahead of ourselves. The possibility of finding Earth-like worlds is but one small part in an ongoing goal to understand the dynamics of solar-system formation on a larger scale. And that is another piece of the puzzle to understanding how exactly we got here in the first place to even ask the questions.
May 8th, 2005 at 2:46 pm
wrt “Regarding UFOs, I still listen to Enrico Fermi (â€?But where are they?â€?).”
Aren’t there some folks that you really go out of your way to avoid? …even though you haven’t met them personally yet? …and really don’t want to?
Maybe they’ve seen enough from afar….
May 9th, 2005 at 5:54 am
[…] cent find of an Exoplanet orbiting a red dwarf near the southern constellation of Hydra in FIRST EXOPLANET IMAGE CONFIRMED!. Yes, size does matter… well, at least in the cosmos. This is goo […]
May 9th, 2005 at 11:32 pm
This made today’s Astronomy Picture of the Day
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap050510.html
May 10th, 2005 at 2:21 am
Fantastic article, thanks! Exciting times.
May 11th, 2005 at 6:31 am
hmmm… Maybe I was expecting too much but I didn’t find that very impressive… but at least the technology used to find planets proved itself useful. I’ll wait until they find a earth like planet to celebrate.
May 12th, 2005 at 4:11 pm
Philip,
This is great news. It should, hopefully,give a fillip to funding prospects for the Terrestrial Planet Finder project, and maybe with the new guy in charge at NASA it could also be progressed a little quicker. Great exposition by the way.
douglas
May 12th, 2005 at 6:54 pm
Phil, this was nice, thanks for posting it.
Danny, however, said “I wonder how long it will take for the woo-woo crowd to take this as a “vindicationâ€? of the truth of UFOs. I’ll keep watch on the fringe.”
Don’t bother. Plenty of us “flakes” who’ve seen them for real, and I don’t mean weather balloons or jupiter or airplanes, are several steps ahead of you on some of the really interesting science, and pseudoskeptics like you will someday get the chance to dine on your words. You’d find it useful to set personal insecurities and jabs aside, as they get in the way of real science, which is about truth, not dogma. Remember once the earth was flat.
May 12th, 2005 at 10:05 pm
[…] warf (centre-right) at a distance that is nearly twice as far as Neptune is from the sun. More at Bad Astronomy. Leave a Reply Name (required) […]
May 13th, 2005 at 2:06 am
Are they going to make a quantum leap in telescope technology or a meteoric rise in imaging quality?
Kidding. I love this site and this is incredibly good news.
Kudos to all those who worked their collective butts off to do this.
May 13th, 2005 at 4:13 am
The planet was seen last year only but it took so much time to confirm it now !
May 15th, 2005 at 9:02 am
The first post I have read here. Subject was very well explained and thread was interesting. I too wish that we could have all the information right now. However, that’s not the way it works – you have to work for everything. Nevertheless, I still want the flying car that Popular Science promised me when I was a kid (grin).
May 16th, 2005 at 10:03 pm
As we used to say on the farm, you splained that well. You must be a goog splainer.
bob
May 16th, 2005 at 11:10 pm
Oh, I’ve splained a goog once or twice in my life.
May 22nd, 2005 at 5:58 am
Fascinating . . . and many congratulations to all of you for the success you have achieved. I admire your hard work and dedication to such an extremely difficult task. Be sure to get back to me when you guys get a clear enough shot to count the number of breasts the female inhabiants are sporting out there. (I’m tryin’ to win a bet.)
June 3rd, 2005 at 7:06 am
Got to this site by accident……..excellent explanations….won’t be able to stay away now
June 29th, 2005 at 10:15 pm
its wonder to say the humans have a image of a planet revolving around the another planet
July 9th, 2005 at 9:49 am
Cool! You do a really great job of explaining this otherwise confuzzling astronomy stuff. I’m not really well versed in astronomy, but I wish that high school (I’m in tenth grade!!) had astronomy classes.
Oh well. Thanks for making this wonderful site!
July 15th, 2005 at 12:28 am
Gr8 explanation…as always…thx
August 22nd, 2005 at 3:43 am
I just wanted to say a huge thank you for this blog. I’ve been lurking since you announced it in your BA newsletter, and I love dropping by to see what’s new. I wouldn’t even consider myself an amateur astronomer - hard to do practical astronomy when you’re occassionally agoraphobic and mildly afraid of the dark. I love the theoretical side of things, though, and you have a wonderful way of explaining them.
Bravo!
August 22nd, 2005 at 3:44 am
I just wanted to say a big, big thank you. I’ve been looking around since you announced it in your BA newsletter. I wouldn’t even consider myself an amateur astronomer - hard to do practical astronomy when you’re occassionally agoraphobic and mildly afraid of the dark. I love the theoretical side of things, though, and you have a wonderful way of explaining them.
Bravo!
August 22nd, 2005 at 3:44 am
I just wanted to say a big, big thank you. I’ve been looking around since you announced it in your BA newsletter.
Thanks!!
August 22nd, 2005 at 11:09 am
[…] Phil over at the stupendous Bad Astronomy Blog has a great post about the first image of a planet outside our solar system. The planet is about five times the mass of Jupiter, and is orbiting a brown dwarf star about 230 light years away. Phil’s got knowledge and experience in it; it’s a very interesting read. Check it out! […]
August 27th, 2005 at 2:45 am
looks like two brown dwarfs
September 5th, 2005 at 8:54 pm
Very interesting piece — I thought exoplanets had only been detected, not actually observed. So, when I saw the photo and read the explanation, I was fascinated.
At first I thought you were going to say the photo was an error (since the site is called “Bad Astronomy”) but was pleased to see that it is authentic. I guess some “good astronomy” is included with the bad here!
Thanks,
Jim
September 7th, 2005 at 2:32 am
Imagin this. a thin mylar parachut in space 100 miles or so across parked in some planets shade. A source of projected light of a single wave lenght is projected into the concave side of the “parachute” to fill it out with light pressure. Carbon fiberes tether ithe mylar to the projectore like the strings of a parachhute to the rider. The projected light “image” may be ajusted to shape the parachute into a parroabla. Now we can study alien insects on Alpha Centari and we are only blind to the projectores light frequency. this could ocellate and then we’re blind to nothing. Why not?????????????????????????????
September 9th, 2005 at 6:23 am
the olathe site school distret are so goos cuz u can see a whole bunch of different thing tht some sites can
September 9th, 2005 at 10:18 pm
On a much more vibrant blog (Richard C. Hoagland’s) I replied to Mr.
Platts unsolicited ‘expose’ re; Mr. Hoagland’s credentials. I guess maybe
you (Phil) ran out of movies to review? It’s funny because I see on your
website you sell bad astronomy t-shirts and other essentials, yet you blast
others for seeking publicity. Cute. I also see your advertising your fabulous award from Scientific American. I guess it’s o.k. to you that Scientific American is a second tier publication, which typically takes their information from true science journals and re-hashes them while trying to portray themselves as breaking the story.
Here is my reply to your attempt to discredit Hoagland.
bryansail said…
So anonymous decides to attack RCH’s credentials here in a blog? Very
interesting…What part of RCH really worries you? Your unsolicited ‘enlightenment’
is not very central to the work (mixed w/ entertainment) being done here.
I also have read these criticisms of RCH long before coming to this blog.
Despite possible conflicts in origination of an idea (often a problem in REAL
scientific discovery) and thus his ‘credentials’ he has shown amazingly good
instincts over multiple decades. Of course you didn’t mention the other
credentials that are ‘trotted out’ when he appears on Coast because they are
not in question. In time Richard Hoagland will be given scientific respect and
credit for popularizing and indeed originating truths and for taking
on NASA when others would not. That he is sooo controversial is clearly an
indicator that using the term ‘pseudo’ alongside his name is incorrect and a sad
attempt to put a lid his claims. It would appear that you are a part of the huge problem
that plaques science today. I suspect that you will also not have nearly
the legacy that RCH will.
Perhaps you should be blogging with those who are coloring the skies of Mars
red, and those who are withholding images and data at NASA. You should be discussing
models of life only existing in the narrow spectrum of ideal, earth-like conditions.
I’m sure that blog will be a real snoozer, but you’ll likely have a wonderful time
there. We have learned more about the universe in the last decade than we ever knew
before, I’m sure there is a little sliver of it that you can excel in, but this blog
is clearly not for you. Really what is it that bothers you about RCH? Is it that
the cover ups are beginning to crumble and that the amazing discoveries
waiting to be revealed far outweigh your narrow ‘expertise’. I’m sure your work is
important as well, it’s too bad you feel the need to attempt to slice up another’s
credentials, and try (though you fail) to discredit him.
-actually your post IS important in that it is a great example of how
many people from all walks of life are coming here to witness this
pseudo-blog. No mention from you as to your (I imagine) belief that hurricane
manipulation is impossible, no doubt that would be your claim or you
perhaps would avoid the science of it and focus on who first came up
with the idea….. because really that IS the most important thing huh?
-Bryan
9/9/05 9:19 PM
Keep up the less than great job trying to discredit someone who will
someday be recognized as being a giant in the field of scientific discovery.
Hope it keeps your fledgling attempt at publicity/career going.
March 29th, 2006 at 5:57 pm
I can just imagine you explaining this on Coast to Coast. I’m sure that by the time you got to “brown dwarf,” George’s eyes would have already glazed over. Kudos on not agreeing to have a “conversation” with Richard c. (Conman?) Hoagland. To do so would legitamize his “science” and, of course, there’s no possible way to do that.
June 1st, 2006 at 7:22 am
bryansail said he was going to prove Hogeland’s credentials, yet immediately went into an attack on the great BA and didn’t say one thing about Hogeland’s credentials. I guess he realized he couldn’t prove any of Hogeland’s credentials and had nothing else to say. The sign of a small mind.
Keep of the good work BA
June 22nd, 2006 at 2:08 am
Great work by the astronomers and a verry amazing discovery. Well written
Ashwin
August 12th, 2006 at 6:39 pm
A ‘quantum leap’ is a small change? I had always thought it meant something that had to happen all at once: For example, the jump of an electron between orbitals in an atom or (macroscopically) the signing of a document (that is, you’d be lauighed out of court if you alleged you were only half-bound by a contract because you only signed your first name).
November 5th, 2006 at 1:22 pm
Regarding the exoplanet 2M1207b:
Was the spectrum of light from the planet analyzed to determine whether it had the right mix of elements to exclude the possibility that it was a star?
If not, then there’s still a possibility that 2M1207b could be a star. If the direction and velocity of 2M1207b and the parent star 2M1207A are similar enough to be within the margin of error for the motion tracking equipment, then they could simply be a pair of optical companion stars.
December 6th, 2006 at 3:23 pm
[…] smacknrat (smacknrat) wrote,@ 2005-05-19 11:17:00 Something old and something new I’m sure many of you already know of the new and ‘final’ Star Wars coming out. This seems to be causing concern amongst fan conventions. Not only that, but the recent departure of Star Trek: Enterprise leaves many to wonder the future of Star Trek as well. Though I missed about all but three episodes of the most current series, the finale of Enterprise was actually well done.Ironically, while both of these issues are receiving wide press the newest scientific discoveries are getting much less attention. We finally have evidence of a black hole forming. Not only that, but we finally have photographic evidence of planets around other stars. Perhaps people would rather be entertained or perhaps black holes (and distant planets) are not very practical… or maybe a series that has been running for 40 years is simply more influential than a real life search in the cosmos for 30 years.In any case, I’m sure the recent discoveries are a blip in scientific terms and benefit very few while the departing sci-fi franchises make up a bulk of the entertainment industry’s lifetime and some people’s lives. I suppose there is a certain amount of elitism in advocating current scientific discovery over imagining science so take this with a grain of salt. Mine was particularly measured out in the smallest amount of untruth.”Science fiction is no more written for scientists that ghost stories are written for ghosts.”Brian Aldiss(Post a new comment) […]
December 8th, 2006 at 12:22 am
Just make sure your daughter’s high school teacher doesn’t try to tell her that toilets flush in different directions on that planet
September 15th, 2008 at 9:07 am
[…] star, then it must be physically associated with the star, and therefore it’s a planet. This is how we confirmed the first image of an exoplanet back in 2005 — but that was orbiting a brown dwarf, a star very different than the […]
October 6th, 2008 at 10:50 am
[…] to the size of the planet). The mass was found using ground-based telescopes, by measuring the amount the planet tugs on the star as it orbits. That’s how the incredible density of this object was […]
November 13th, 2008 at 12:00 pm
[…] you have the news, a few caveats. We now know of more than 300 planets orbiting other stars. And a planet has been imaged before, but it was orbiting a brown dwarf, which is different than a normal star like the Sun. Brown […]
November 14th, 2008 at 3:49 am
[…] como a ocultação de uma estrela. É bom lembrar também que um exoplaneta já tinha sido fotografado anteriormente, mas ele orbitava uma anã marrom, que também são conhecidas como estrelas fracassadas. As […]