Friday, November 14, 2008

First fuzzy photos of planets outside solar system

It's only a matter of time before "we get a dot that's blue and Earthlike," said astronomer Bruce Macintosh of the Lawrence Livermore National Lab. He led one of the two teams of photographers.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

"It's only a matter of time before 'we get a dot that's blue and Earthlike,' said astronomer Bruce Macintosh..."

Uh, yeah, but how much time, and how will that be done? It's one thing to image triple or quintuple Jupiter-size, glowing gas orb giants in very close orbit to their native star, but yet another rather more difficult thing to image an earth-like planet that is not obscured by the distant star's own brightness. Any timeframe or tech know-how guesstimates out there?

Anonymous said...

Fomalhaut! That's where August Derleth's "Cthuga" fire elemental comes from! I just read that story the other day. Oh shit!