Not to self-plug, but here's my video of the same four planets:<p><a href="https://sefffal.github.io/images/orbital-animation.mp4" rel="nofollow">https://sefffal.github.io/images/orbital-animation.mp4</a><p>The creator of the GIF above used a data from a range of different telescopes and wavelengths, whereas I made this with using data only from same telescope (Keck), instrument, and wavelength (3.5 microns; near infrared).
How come both videos only go up to 2022 or so? Did we stop watching this star? Or is there just a delay on releasing the data?
I’m curious what that blight red smoke flickering around the star is. Some kind of interplanatory gas?
omg both animations are gorgeous; those far out orbits sure take a long time to complete
For those that don't know, the Drake equation [0] included a term for "percentage of stars with at least one orbiting planet".<p>That was originally assumed to be non-zero but very low. Modern planet hunting techniques have revised that number to be close to 100%. [1]<p>0 - <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation</a><p>1 - <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation#:~:text=Fraction%20of%20those%20stars%20that%20have%20planets%2C%20fpedit" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation#:~:text=Fractio...</a>
Worth being very clear that this is not a real video of the system, it's 10 static images with a few hundred interpolated "fake" frames. Still very cool though.
I'm excited for the leap in this tech that the Nancy Grace Roman telescope's new chronograph promises.<p><a href="https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/the-roman-coronagraph-instrument/" rel="nofollow">https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/the-roman-coronagraph-inst...</a><p><i>The Roman Coronagraph is designed to detect planets 100 million times fainter than their stars, which is 100 to 1,000 times better than existing space-based coronagraphs. The Roman Coronagraph will be capable of directly imaging reflected starlight from a planet akin to Jupiter in size, temperature, and distance from its parent star.</i>
Amazing. Scrolling down one of the comments has an animation of starts around the center of the Milky Way. I have seen a few short ones of nebulae. There should be much much more of this sort of thing.<p>I appreciate that scientist are not always after the pretty pictures. They can be expensive, do not always give the data needed, and the experiments do not always produce data that has obvious pretty picture potential. Still, for the average non professional scientist (me) the pictures are about all I will ever get out of the science.
Direct link: <a href="https://bsky.app/profile/sagastar.bsky.social/post/3mwucitftzs2o" rel="nofollow">https://bsky.app/profile/sagastar.bsky.social/post/3mwucitft...</a><p>Imagine living on a planet circling a star circling a black hole. This thing in the sky just growing bigger and smaller in your sky on a 12 year, or longer, cycle.<p>I wonder what Sag A* would look like in the night sky.
The galactic center data actually proved there was a supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, and weighed it precisely from those stars motions. The name of the account that posted that animation (Sagittarius A*) is the name of that supermassive black hole.<p>This work earned the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics: <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2020/summary/" rel="nofollow">https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2020/summary/</a>
When you think about it, it's so mindblowing that we humans can study and talk about these unimaginably large objects in the universe. Yet they just exist there regardless of what we do or think about them and will continue to exist way past whatever happens to our species.
The term I would use instead is that the data provided observational support of a hypothesis. It didn't "prove" anything- proofs only exist in math. (yes, I know people use "prove" is colloquial way, but it's misleading, especially in observational work where you can't control variables to find causality.
Can you explain the past tense "there was" ? Is there a reason for a black hole to dissapear?
It’s probably still there, but it’s 26,000 light years away, so the light we’re seeing today left Sag A in the Paleaolithic era.
Black holes probably disappear due to Hawking radiation, but I don’t think we have observational evidence and the process takes forever for the black holes you can observe.
The black hole still exists (probably), the hypothesis that it existed was proven in the past.
A good chunk of science communication centres around how one conveys the wow factor to folks who aren't already obsessed with the particular field. Images like this really help sell it to the rest of us
> There should be much much more of this sort of thing.<p>As more telescopes come online, there'll be more data available for this type of stuff. You gotta realize that when a telescope only looks at something once per year, it takes a long time to gather enough data for these types of images to be created. My go to example is the motion of stars around SagA*.
Somewhat related, but probably more fascinating: a time lapse animation of stars orbiting the blackhole at the center of our galaxy (Sagittarius A*) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TF8THY5spmo" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TF8THY5spmo</a>
Also check out the Simulated Observation of the Solar System by the Habitable Worlds Observatory (under "Videos"), expected to be launched in the 2040s, the first to be able to detect Earth-like planets around Sun-like stars! <a href="https://habitableworldsobservatory.org/multimedia" rel="nofollow">https://habitableworldsobservatory.org/multimedia</a><p>DrBecky's video on it: <a href="https://youtube.com/watch?v=z2JIkAPcdnU" rel="nofollow">https://youtube.com/watch?v=z2JIkAPcdnU</a>
There are many more of these : <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_directly_imaged_exoplanets" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_directly_imaged_exopla...</a>
Space and the enormity of it breaks your mind when you start thinking about it.<p>The star in the middle of the animation, is approximately 20AU (Astronomical Units) in size looking at the scale line. 20AU is approximately 1.8b miles/3b kilometres or approximately the distance from the Sun to Uranus.<p>If Google's correct, if everyone on Earth lived on that star - each and every one of us could have a backyard larger than the surface area of Earth ;p
Wow, in terms of angle, how far are these planets separated from the star?<p>I always thought we would never be able to image something like that. The distances would be too small and the contrast too large to figure something at the resolution we can get on earth. I'll need to read up on how this was done.
The scale bar (20 AU) represents 20 time the distance between the Earth and the sun. This star is about 41 parsecs away, so the angular size of that scale bar is about half an arcsec. (One degree is split into 60 arcminutes, one arcminute into 60 arcseconds. Just like a clock).<p>That angle is about the diameter of a US quarter coin seen from 11km (7mi) away.
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HR_8799" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HR_8799</a>
Yea, the planets are gigantic, and in distant orbits from their star. I don't think we even have the ability yet to directly image exoplanets much smaller than, say, Saturn, or closer to their stars than Saturn.
TL;DR - Two inside (16, 26AU) and two outside (43, 69AU) Pluto's orbit (39AU). They are all estimated to be a bit bigger than Jupiter.
The noise from the blocked-out star noticably decreases in 2017. Is that due to changes in the stars' activity cycle, or is that due to better processing/capture technology?
I do not know, but my best guess would be an improved post processing algorithm was introduced.
I believe it's because the star's brightness does fluctuate, so activity cycle based?
Interesting to see 12 years in 12 seconds, time is relatíve
I swear I'm not trying to criticize, but, uh--why only 10 or so photos? Why not just film it long term? Is it our position in earth's orbit that only lets us image that system once a year or so?
Telescope time is precious.
> but, uh--why only 10 or so photos?<p>The instrument is operated according to a detailed schedule that spans years. It takes a committee to create the schedule, and each separately scheduled observation is then organized by a team, with different teams organizing different observations.<p>They cannot simply aim the instrument at one system and forego everything else. The result you see is a campaign credited to at least four team members, and enough schedule time committed to make approximately one observation per year.
What are the odds of there being smaller exoplanets that are effectively being outshone by the others? Since each one these is more massive than Jupitar.
When my mother was born, plate tectonics was a hypothesis. When I was born we didn't know for certain if planets existed outside of our solar system.
They need to remove that one frame
So all we have to do is send telescope right up and let it record...
I will just say that this short movie is something most beautiful I've seen in last several years. To be able to see this, for real, not as a side-effect to the star is absolutely mind blowing.
From ~0:04 - 0:05, two dots at ~10 and 8 o'clock fade in and out simultaneously, with roughly the size and brightness of the planets. They peak at observation ~2016-07-06. Any idea what they are?<p>Their balanced position and simultaneous changes make them seem like an artifact of the imaging.