Cognitive Labs

Inset: image of planet Fomalhaut b orbiting star Fomalhaut

UC Berkeley and LLNL astronomers led by Paul Kalas and Eugene Chiang have taken the first optical picture of a planet outside the solar system, with collaboration from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and JPL in Pasadena.

The planet, with a mass of no more than 3 Jupiters and a likely Saturn-like ring system, orbits the star Fomalhaut (Arabic: fum al-hawt فم الحوت or 'mouth of the whale') in the constellation Piscis Austrinis, 25 light years away. Fomalhaut has a diameter 1.7 times that of the sun and is only 300 million years old, compared to an estimated 5 billion for the sun. Over the past decade, exoplanet hunting has become an intriguing new field, with the presence of planets mostly detected through careful measurements of radial velocity. In 2007, the first-ever spectroscopy of exoplanets commenced with HD209458b in Pegasus, where the planetary spectrum could be resolved against the overwhelming glare of its sun.

It's now believed that those stars with heavier elements in their spectra (e.g., iron) will have a corresponding greater likelihood of earth or mars-like solid planets, leading to a vast potential for discovery using well established spectroscopic techniques coupled with more powerful telescopes to probe the basic DNA of stars and accompanying planetary systems without ever leaving earth.

Fomalhaut has appeared frequently in fiction and also in the RPG Final Fantasy as the nomenclature referring to a class of lasergun. Berkeley-native and writer Phillip K. Dick (Blade Runner, A Scanner Darkly, VALIS, etc.) believed that he periodically was in receipt of communications beamed from Fomalhaut's then-unknown planetary system which he imagined exerted a matrix-like control over earth. Interestingly, Ursula K. LeGuin, daughter of UC-Berkeley anthropologist Alfred Kroeber (studies of Ishi, the last 'wild Indian') wrote a novel, Rocannon's World, speculatively set on the second planet of Fomalhaut, which of course, happens to be known as Fomalhaut b today - and has now been photographed.

Labels: acid blockers, chiang, dick, exoplanet, fomalhaut, hd209458b, kalas, leguin, radial, rocannon, spectroscopy, valis, velocity

Another scientific first: NASA has just published a "map" of a planet outside our solar system. The images were captured by the Spitzer Space telescope.

The planet in question is like Jupiter, only much hotter - and the map shows the differences in termperature. How did they do it? Find Out

The planet, by the way, is in the constellation Vulpecula "the fox" - 63 light years away, where it orbits a star that is smaller than the sun. This late spring/early summer constellation also houses the well-known Dumbbell Nebula - the remnant of an exploding star.

Labels: exoplanet, nasa, roaster