That’s a video of planets orbiting a star 129 light years away. I didn’t know we could do that. My gast is well and truly flabbered.

It is cool, no doubt.

But the dudes who filmed it could have removed the Lucky Charm cereal from the screen first.

I knew that they could see planets orbiting stars where the planets passed in front of the star and so darkened the star’s brightness a little, but I never knew they could see planets orbiting like that.

That is really impressive to see.

Shows you how sensitive the equipment must be to pick up reflected light from planets 129 light years away. Just how many photons make it here ?

Is that not a pseudo-coloured image based on non visual electromagnetic or radio signals?

I never realised stars were actually star-shaped in real life 🙂

orbiting a star 129 light years away

go on then, how do they do that? Assuming they didn’t set the equipment up 129 years ago?

go on then, how do they do that? Assuming they didn’t set the equipment up 129 years ago?

:/

The light has been continuously heading this way for a bit more than 129 years…

Lucky we got it when we did, then! Otherwise it might have just shot past

I never realised stars were actually star-shaped in real life

Why would we draw stars that shape if they weren’t?

Thats very interesting.

OP where did you find that video.

Be interested to learn more about what observation method they are using to find 4 planets 129 light years away

Found the sources…

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

and

Direct imaging of four planets orbiting the star HR 8799 129 light years away from Earth from space

and

A Four Planet System in Orbit, Directly Imaged and Remarkable

Wasn’t aware that any exo-planets have actually been directly observed, but apparently there’s been a few.

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

The above is HR 8799 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HR_8799#Planetary_system

Seems to involve “a coronagraph to block the light from the star, revealing the dimmer light reflected by a planet in its shadow”

http://www.space.com/31497-exoplanets-direct-imaging-next-big-thing.html

Edit: Beaten to it 😀

That is absolutely staggeringly brilliant. Cheers OP!

love it!

fascinating reading on the wiki link too

So they really were directly imaged, thats pretty amazing. I guess directly imaging planets closer to their star would be a lot harder due to glare from the star. Although I’m sure the technique will develop

It is truly phenomenal – when I was an astronomy student, we were told that we’d probably never be able to image exoplanets directly, just goes to show how good the telescopes and processing have become.

Check out the scale though – looks like the star and the inner planet are 20 au across, which is 20 times the distance from here to the sun. That’s a big star system and some huge planets going round pretty slowly. So whilst it looks like our system with its four inner planets, it’s probably not.

Cool all the same mind 🙂

That inner planet is about the same distance from its star as Uranus is from our Sun so there’s a lot of space in between. It also means that those outer planets are a long, long way out.