ESO
Having been a teenager in the early '70s I'd be more interested in visiting the far-out exoplanet.
Close-in makes me kind of uptight, man.
Maybe the Men In Black can answer that. But I can't find an email addr or phone# for them
??? Something not quite right here, or perhaps because it's 3am here, but am I reading this correctly?
61.3 TRILLION miles is the same distance as between the Earth and Sun ???
Is this supposed to be “exciting” news, because if it is, I ain’t feeling it.
Wilbur, did you leave the light on in the barn?
This ‘Exo Planet’ is over 10 light years away from it’s star. More like 660,000 AU. It’s not a planet, it’s a dim little star.
Note that the pale blue dot in the image is the star; the planet is the tiny tiny brown pixel at about the 10:30 -11:00 o’clock position off of the star.
The really “exciting” news is that the scientists have managed to develop a direct image of the planet vice inferring one. If I understand the magnitude of the accomplishment correctly (and it is one), this requires them to not only know its orbital period but also to know where it is in that orbit to have confidence that the image is, in fact, an image of the planet.
Also, keep in mind that in addition to its 27,000 year orbit around its home star, the planet is 1200 light years away. So the image provided is the image of the planet about the time of Charlemagne.
The planet itself is so far distant from its sun (at 660 AU) that liquid water doesn’t exist on its surface. The brown color of the image is likely an indication of a rock hard frozen surface.
See, miles are much, much more precise than kilometers, which are more precise than AU. It's amazing how unit conversions add precision!
It also looks like they helped themselves to few extra orders of magnitude out of open stock, as it were. An astronomical unit is 149,597,870,700 meters, not kilometers.
How about 660 AU or about 100,000,000,000 kilometers or 62,000,000,000 miles. (There is some confusion about whether a billion means 1 followed by 9 zeros or 12. The British have adopted the U.S. convention, 9 zeros only recently. Otherwise, I would have said 100 billion and 62 billion.)
Looks like someone at the end of the street with a flashlight.......maybe a burglar?
Space is beyond huge. Think of it this way. what they are seeing was reflected light that came off a planet around 800 A.D. 600 years before colubus “ sailed the ocean blue”. Righht now that palnet couls be dust , hit by a huge meteorite and vaporized. but we wouldnt know that until 3219..
So what are we seeing? Is the planet the big white globe in the middle or the white dot at 10:30?
Its just a light blob moving around really really far away from us but until we can decide on what it actually is we are calling it an “exoplanet”. We thought we spotted a single cell life form but the triggering caused by the recapture of the escaped neutrinos caused an automatic voluntary spontaneous abortion of the viable fetus. The host being’s mental well being has been compromised and now we must send trillions of dollars in compensation to the host beings for their fragile mental well state lest they will become the largest irritant in the known galaxy.
Oh .... so THAT’S what it looks like!
