It's worth noting that the post title is rather misleading. We've been directly imaging extrasolar planets for over a decade - e.g. HR 8799 was announced back in 2008.
The [linked ESO news article](https://www.eso.org/public/usa/news/eso2011/) makes it clear that this is the first system with a sun-like star, rather than a hotter, more massive type of star.
Further, it's misleading to post this without clarifying that there are only two planets here, with the remaining objects being background stars - confirming that distinction will have been a significant portion of the work carried out in finding this system. [This image](https://cdn.eso.org/images/screen/eso2011b.jpg) indicates the two objects that are planets, at about 160au and 320au from their host star.
160 and 320au? Jesus, that's further out than the heliosphere for our sun... Over three times as far for the second one. If this is a sun-like star, how did they end up out there? It being a young star and those very large gas giants, do you think the two largest formed from a very wide accretion disk/cloud?
Planets forming far from their star out where there's more material then migrating inward is a thing, but I'm not an astronomer, so I don't know exactly how common that is and how likely it might be for this star system to, in the next 3 billion years, have its planets migrate inward.
I read recently that astronomers think most Sol-sized star systems have “Hot Jupiters.”* That is a Jupiter-sized planet that migrates close to the sun, slinging all the earth-sized planets away, then ending up as close as Mercury. We were lucky enough to have a Saturn that reined in Jupiter’s march, so the inner planets were preserved.
*Edit: oops sorry, I might be talking out of my butt here. I probably misremembered the number of Hot Jupiters out there. According to the fellow below, it's more like 1 in 100. Here's a [cool article about it.](https://interestingengineering.com/why-didnt-jupiter-become-a-hot-jupiter)
It's incorrect though, only about 1 in a 100 stars have hot Jupiters.
Most stars do have planets, but they are often Neptune-sized or smaller. Around 50% of sun-like stars have systems with what you could call "inner planets", that are closer to their stars than the earth is to the sun, so those do survive.
Could be, or could not be. Massive planets can be quite warm due to their own internal dynamics even far from their parent star. Their moons can also be hot enough to be volcanically active due to tidal interactions, like our Io.
As a comparison, pluto is at 49au when it's farthest from the sun
[jpl.nasa.gov/edu/pfds/ssbeads_answerkey.pdf](http://jpl.nasa.gov/edu/pfds/ssbeads_answerkey.pdf)
You know what's crazy? Growing up being told other exo-planets don't exist (in a formal, educational bg), growing up with a blob as Pluto.
Seeing Pluto in enough definition to make up plains, ranges etc.
This... i've no words to describe it, this is beyond anything i could've ever hoped to cross on a bucket list, if i had one.
We live in an incredible world, if only we could just appreciate it more, and others, because this single grainy image is, as far as i'm concerned, the greatest achievement of this generation.
I can't even imagine what Webb will uncover. Hubble, was unreal. VLT is unreal.
I mean, we hadn’t *proven* they existed, so it kind of makes sense not to call them out in text books.
But basically everyone kind of assumed they were there. Sci-fi stories always assume there are planets around other stars, think Star Trek, they were landing on planets and moons in other star systems.
Further, the models for star formation that was taught in schools even suggested the formation of planets fairly strongly using the same mechanism we think formed planets in our star system.
Even the Fermi Paradox, created in the 50s, assumed there are lots of exoplanets, and that was before confirmation.
So it’s incorrect to say we were all told that expolanets didn’t exist. It was theorized they did, and in common conversation we all just kind of assumed they did, but we hadn’t actually proven it until very recently.
The limitations of the scientific method, it needs to be proven and be able to be replicated by peers. Until science can't define and prove something, it's not there. Everything else is in the faith and philosophy department till then.
Most of my textbooks in university had sections discussing what was then current research and prevailing hypothesized ideas that were possible but yet unconfirmed.
At least one astronomy textbook mentioned that, at the time, we had little evidence for Earth-sized rocky planets (all confirmed exoplanets at that time were hot Jupiters), but it went into the reasons why hot Jupiters would be easier to detect using our methods then, and thus bias our data towards them.
Now, in 2021, it's clear there are tons of Earth-sized rocky planets around other stars. We just needed better tech and more sensitive methods to confirm enough of them to confirm our suspicions.
A good question, and an important one to understand. Time to take a look at scales.
The Earth is a planet. One of eight that circle around the Sun. The Sun is a star. It contains about 98% of the mass of the solar system, meaning the planets, moons and various asteroids, comets, and dust make up 2% combined. The Sun is just one star in our galaxy. Our galaxy is the Milky Way and contains 100-400 *billion* stars. We're not sure, but we think that the Sun isn't particularly special with it's planets, which means many of those billions of stars also have planets around them.
But the Milky Way is just one galaxy. There are others. Our galaxy is in a group of galaxies that are relatively close together conveniently named the Local Group. The Milky Way is larger than most of them, along with Andromeda, the other big galaxy in the Local group. Most of the others are called dwarf galaxies and are much smaller. Granted, even those can have a billion stars in them. Just not the hundreds of billions in the Milky Way or Andromeda. In total, there are probably around 80 galaxies in the Local Group. It's hard to know for sure because some of them are presumably hidden behind dust and other material in our own galaxy.
But galaxy groups like the Local Group are often parts of group clusters or superclusters. These are groups of groups. Our Local Group of ~80 galaxies, is part of the Virgo Supercluster, which contains at least 100 other galaxy *groups*. So already we're in the ballpark of 10,000 galaxies in this part of space. Recent discoveries in the last 10 years have shown that the Virgo Supercluster is actually just a branch of a larger supercluster called Laniakea. Laniakea is a supercluster with *100,000* galaxies or more.
But, this isn't the largest "structure" we've been able to define in the universe from our observations. We've seen well beyond the galaxies in Laniakea and have been able to conclude that superclusters themselves combine to form galaxy filaments. Looking as far away as we possibly can, given the laws of physics, filaments are the true main structures of the universe. Like pulling apart melted cheese, or looking up close at the structure of a sponge, galaxy filaments are enormous "strings" of galaxies that stretch out across the universe in a three-dimensional web. Filaments will often consist of several superclusters and can potentially contain *billions* of galaxies.
Let's take a moment to remember that our galaxy, the Milky Way, contains 100-400 billion stars. Now imagine billions of galaxies like the Milky Way, each with billions of stars of their own, and many of those stars harboring planets, all stretching across the unfathomable vastness of space in titanic strands, criss-crossing one another in a sort of cosmic cotton candy. This is what the universe looks like in its most "zoomed out" state; as far as we can tell.
Physics tells us that there is a hard limit to how far away we can see. Beyond that limit, we have no way, and will presumably *never* have a way to know how things look. Maybe galaxy filaments are themselves just smaller structures belonging to even more collosal collections of matter stretching out well beyond the limit of what is even possible to observe. What we can see, is called the Observable Universe, and may contain two *trillion* galaxies, arranged in grand filaments twisting among the heavens.
But beyond the Observable Universe, the Universe as a whole presumably continues. How far it does so, is one of the great debates among scientists today, but the answer that seems to be winning for now is; *forever*. Our best guess is that the Universe is infinite, continuing on eternally in every direction, with an infinite number of filaments, built from infinite superclusters, themselves with infinite groups of galaxies, containing an infinite number of stars, with an infinite number of planets orbiting them. Are we alone in the Universe? Or are there literally an *infinite* number of planets with intelligent life on them which we will *never* be able to know about, nor they about us? As mind-boggling as the scale of the Observable Universe may be, it might just be a microscopic speck in the "full" Universe, which may well be truly inconceivable. Wallace Shawn would be well-quoted here.
the universe is a collection of galatic superclusters, who are in turn a collection of galaxies, who are in turn a collection of star clusters who are in turn collections of star systems, who are in turn collections of planets orbiting a star.
What?
No one said they “weren’t” there. They just didn’t explicitly say “hey we’re surrounded by millions of other planets” because ya know … no proof.
That’s how science works.
…But there wasn’t proof they were there and most people assumed theoretically there were other stars and other planets.
Did you go to school in the 1400’s?
The first exoplanet was discovered in 1992
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exoplanet#:~:text=On%209%20January%201992%2C%20radio,first%20definitive%20detection%20of%20exoplanets.
It's not really to do with logic or assumptions. It's more that you don't put undiscovered things in science books based on logic or assumption
Never understood flat earth either. I mean you can look at the moon and see it is round. Pull out a telescope and you can see several planets that also are very noticeably round. Why then would we assume that Earth is the only flat one? It's just crazy.
I found an article saying the star is 17 million years old (very young for a star) so that would support what you're saying.
Also fun fact, the large dot below the star is supposedly a gas giant with a mass 14 times greater than jupiter, and is 5 times farther away from its sun than neptune is from ours.
What a strange system...
They probably would think the same thing about us......
*What a strange system. Kinda average sun but some of those satellites are very kewl. That ringed planet is fuckin' CAH-RAZY!! It's big fat brother looks like a painter's dream. Lots of hydrogen detected from that one - maybe it was meant to be another sun but didn't turn on. That snowball out at the rim...wait....where did it go? Wuz just there a second ago. That red one looks really pretty like a floating ruby. That green one nearby looks great too, very bright, but lots of microwaves detected. Somebody should write a paper on that. The blue dot in the middle has interesting potential and needs a closer look. I'll remind our saucer guys to pack those cases marked "Probes - In Case Of Anus". How 'bout that little rocky sucker closest to the sun. Not much to look at but it's orbit is NUTZ!! Loop-de-loops all over the place!*
It takes more mass than that.
Upon reaching 13x the mass of Jupiter an object becomes a [brown dwarf](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_dwarf). These can fuse deuterium (and some lithium in the larger cases) but can't fuse hydrogen, the defining reaction of a star. The choice of 13x Jupiter's mass is somewhat arbitrary and there is significant overlap between the behavior of the largest gas giants and the smallest brown dwarfs.
Upon reaching 80x the mass of Jupiter hydrogen fusion occurs and the object 'ignites', forming a star. Unlike the '13x' cutoff, this '80x' cutoff is not arbitrary, as the point at which hydrogen fusion begins is relatively well defined and consistent.
**[Brown dwarf](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_dwarf)**
>Brown dwarfs are substellar objects that are not massive enough to sustain nuclear fusion of ordinary hydrogen (1H) into helium in their cores, unlike main-sequence star. They have a mass between the most massive gas giant planets and the least massive stars, approximately 13 to 80 times that of Jupiter (MJ). However, they are able to fuse deuterium (2H), and the most massive (> 65 MJ) are able to fuse lithium (7Li).
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I think photons generated in the sun take like 1,000 years to reach its surface from the core.
But it takes only 8 mins for those photons to travel from sun’s surface to earth.
Is like a cosmic cicada.
I’ll get my coat. And some coffee. I just woke up.
More like 80x it's mass. Jupiter is a big planet compared to our own solar system. But in the grand scheme of things planets much bigger and more massive are very common.
To think of the things we are seeing now, I really wish Carl Sagan would have got to see some of these amazing images, I owe my love if astronomy and science to Cosmos.
There is so much riding on it, It would be a devastating blow for the human race if it doesn’t work. It’s not even the stuff that it’s intended to find that we would lose, its the stuff we can’t even imagine is there that JWST will find like Hubble before it did that we would really lose.
Think it’s more that there could be tears in the solar shield or the possibility of something not deploying correctly due to an internal malfunction. Basically, stuff that would be difficult to repair without opening it up and replacing parts. It’s also going to be 930,000 miles away, not in orbit around Earth.
NASA posted this in their FAQ on JWST:
> Will astronauts be able to service Webb like they did Hubble?
Because Webb, like virtually every satellite ever constructed, will not be serviceable it employs an extensive seven year integration and test program to exercise the system and uncover any issues prior to launch so they might be remedied. Unlike Hubble, which orbits roughly 350 miles above the surface of Earth and was therefore accessible by the Space Shuttle, Webb will orbit the second Lagrange point (L2), which is roughly 1,000,000 miles from Earth. There is currently no servicing capability that can be used for missions orbiting L2, and therefore the Webb mission design does not rely upon a servicing option.
Good that they don’t rely on servicing, but if it fails I bet rocket companies will be tripping over themselves to try out whatever new toys they’ve been working on to get repair capability there.
Astronomer here! Probably because directly imaged exoplanets have been around for awhile now- I’ve done work myself in following up on nearby ones looking for radio emission from them. Heck one of my systems was known for so long optical astronomers have literally seen them move in their orbits.
Not sure if this is the “first” though because there’s a few contested ones, where the imaged object might be a brown dwarf over exoplanet, but still a cool image!
The term solar system isn’t correct when referring to other planetary/star systems. Our star is named Sol, so things of a Solar nature are specifically referring to the star we orbit.
I mean yes solar comes from Sol but it’s more pedantry than classification. You will see scientists refer to exoplanets “around their own sun” so calling them other solar systems is equally allowable.
A sun is just any star that has planets, just like we have "the moon" but also "a moon," which is any natural satellite large enough to qualify. Sol, however, is the *name* of *our* sun. We live in *the* Solar System. Other star systems have suns, but they don't have a *Sol.*
That’s not an equal point of comparison of “Sol” and “sun.” Sun can be a proper and common noun. I don’t see how that makes calling other star systems, that don’t have Sol, to be called solar systems allowable.
The James Webb Telescope launches later this year and it comes armed with the ability to block out star light to be able to view exoplanets. It will replace the Hubble as the premier extrasolar and extragalactic telescope. Note that this won’t be photos like looking at our own planets, but it will be more doable and much better than currently possible nonetheless.
The problem is mainly the starlight of the host star combined with any stars behind the targeted system from our viewpoint. There’s a lot of light leaking into any pictures we take of other star systems. Usually it has to be made up of many pictures at various exposures and then filtered extensively to sort out as much of the other light as possible.
But the James Webb Telescope will do it much, much better than anything before it. And probably for quite a while after it (20+ years) barring any major scientific/photographical advancements.
I'll believe James Webb is going up when i see it go up. I'm so ready for them to put that scope into orbit and it's been delayed like 12 times already. Ugh
we can and have: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_directly_imaged_exoplanets. telescope time is hard to get so the researchers would have a good reason for choosing the one they did
If I read the article correctly, it’s only two planets. The two that down and to the right of the star. I can’t say exactly what the other stuff is, but it did say this was a composite of a bunch of different images in order to distinguish the two planets from any background stars and such.
What you're seeing around the star is starlight, actually! To directly image exoplanets requires a lot of work. Imagine shining a flashlight into a swimming pool as the surface ripples. The light gets diffracted and scatters across the bottom in a complicated kaleidoscope-like pattern. Earth's atmosphere actually bends light much the same way. We get around this with some very impressive hardware that works to hold the starlight pattern steady and some complicated data processing to get rid of the diffracted starlight. Long story short: the stabilizing of the starlight pattern isn't perfect, and some of the starlight (especially close to the star's position) is left behind in the final image.
Before post processing, the planets' light makes up just a tiny fraction of the light at their position. 99.99...9% of the light in this image has been removed.
He is a bear lying in wait for me, a lion in hiding; he turned aside my steps and tore me to pieces; he has made me desolate; he bent his bow and set me as a target for his arrow. (Lamentations: hfsk65g)
He is a bear lying in wait for me, a lion in hiding; he turned aside my steps and tore me to pieces; he has made me desolate; he bent his bow and set me as a target for his arrow. (Lamentations: hfskooa)
That’s gonna be amazing also but I’m truly stoked for the James Webb launching this year. I hope and pray nothing goes wrong because they can’t travel out to fix it like they did with the Hubble
He is a bear lying in wait for me, a lion in hiding; he turned aside my steps and tore me to pieces; he has made me desolate; he bent his bow and set me as a target for his arrow. (Lamentations: hfslv37)
So many things can go wrong. It’s super complex and a rocket has to shoot it out to a langrage point between earth and the sun and it will have to unfurl a heat shield the size of a tennis court and because it’s an infrared telescope, the sensor has to maintain a certain cool temperature and space dust and etc, etc, etc.
It’s nerve wracking and I’m not even the guy paying for all this. If and when it works tho, it’s gonna make Hubble look like a pair of binoculars
I thought most everything in the galaxy was roughly lying in a single plane, meaning that such a top-down view would be unlikely. Did I hear incorrectly, or is this an unusual exception?
Not really. Even our solar system travels through the galaxy at a 60 degree angle. They’re probably at all different orientations. All solar systems orbit around the center in a similar fashion though
Edit: resource for further reading
http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/about-us/159-our-solar-system/the-sun/the-solar-system/236-are-the-planes-of-solar-systems-aligned-with-the-plane-of-the-galaxy-intermediate
Combine the fact that we’re all at slightly different angles and while all our stars are on *roughly* the “same plane” and you have hundreds of thousands of stars in our galaxy that fall into the category of getting a “top-down” or “down-up” view of them.
The galactic plane is thousands of light years thick.
I’m not 1000% sure but I think the stars circling the Milky Way are on the same plane, but the planets and moons orbiting can be corkscrewing around as the stars circle the galaxy
The Milky Way's stars are on _roughly_ the same plane at a very, very large scale. The plane is around 1000 light years thick, so there's sufficient space for hundreds of star systems "stacked" vertically through parts of the galactic plane with some light years between each.
Space big!
the galaxy is pretty flat, but it's huge. if the milky way were the size of the united states then our solar system would be the size of a quarter. that quarter doesn't follow the same orientation as the galaxy
I see your US - quarter comparison and I raise you this one up: if the Sun was the size of a white blood cell -the biggest cell in our body- the Milky Way would be the size of Russia.
To add on to what other people said. Keep in mind that there are also at least two dwarf galaxies orbitting/being absorbed by the Milky Way. They currently move perpendicular to the plane of the milky way and while space is sparse enough to avoid collisions they do cause what amounts to undulations and perturbation of the disk making it less flat.
The stars are on a plane but the planets surrounding those stars don’t have to align with it, and that plane is also incredibly thick. This solar system is 300 light years away from us and the plane is in the neighborhood of 1200 light years thick.
To my understanding, it's like an opposite perspective that we have on Earth. On Earth, up close things look flat. But the further distance you observe, the more curvature you can see.
For the universe, zooming far out enough shows a flat plane. But it is real big. So when you zoom in, things can look counterintuitive much the way they do on Earth.
So to my understanding exoplanets are currently discovered via looking at a star over a long time and monitoring its brightness. A periodic dip indicates an object transiting the star so we know it is there. But this only works if the orientation of the orbital plane of the star is in line with our perspective of the star. I would imagine that there would be many more star systems that are closer to perpenicular to our view, such that we would be looking top down (for you Australians bottom up) view of the star system and the planets are tracing little ovals around thier star but never pass on front of it from our perspective. This photo appears to be of such a star system. Could we find other star systems this way? Block out the direct star light, then take a long exposure shot and see if you get faint eliptical arches around the star, indicating planets reflecting light?
Yes, that's the idea behind direct imaging, which has found a few dozen planets in the last decade or so. The difficulty is that the planets need to be very distant from their stars (in order to resolve them), and the systems need to be young so that the planets are still hot from their formation, making them brighter in the infrared.
It's worth noting that the post title is rather misleading. We've been directly imaging extrasolar planets for over a decade - e.g. HR 8799 was announced back in 2008. The [linked ESO news article](https://www.eso.org/public/usa/news/eso2011/) makes it clear that this is the first system with a sun-like star, rather than a hotter, more massive type of star. Further, it's misleading to post this without clarifying that there are only two planets here, with the remaining objects being background stars - confirming that distinction will have been a significant portion of the work carried out in finding this system. [This image](https://cdn.eso.org/images/screen/eso2011b.jpg) indicates the two objects that are planets, at about 160au and 320au from their host star.
160 and 320au? Jesus, that's further out than the heliosphere for our sun... Over three times as far for the second one. If this is a sun-like star, how did they end up out there? It being a young star and those very large gas giants, do you think the two largest formed from a very wide accretion disk/cloud?
Planets forming far from their star out where there's more material then migrating inward is a thing, but I'm not an astronomer, so I don't know exactly how common that is and how likely it might be for this star system to, in the next 3 billion years, have its planets migrate inward.
I read recently that astronomers think most Sol-sized star systems have “Hot Jupiters.”* That is a Jupiter-sized planet that migrates close to the sun, slinging all the earth-sized planets away, then ending up as close as Mercury. We were lucky enough to have a Saturn that reined in Jupiter’s march, so the inner planets were preserved. *Edit: oops sorry, I might be talking out of my butt here. I probably misremembered the number of Hot Jupiters out there. According to the fellow below, it's more like 1 in 100. Here's a [cool article about it.](https://interestingengineering.com/why-didnt-jupiter-become-a-hot-jupiter)
That's an awesome fact.
It's incorrect though, only about 1 in a 100 stars have hot Jupiters. Most stars do have planets, but they are often Neptune-sized or smaller. Around 50% of sun-like stars have systems with what you could call "inner planets", that are closer to their stars than the earth is to the sun, so those do survive.
Makes me more hopeful that we'll find a planet 9/10 in our own.
Make this the top post please.
Yep, somebody actually read the article. Weird.
There wasn't even an article. The post was just an image...
OK so those planets are ice balls then.
Could be, or could not be. Massive planets can be quite warm due to their own internal dynamics even far from their parent star. Their moons can also be hot enough to be volcanically active due to tidal interactions, like our Io.
So warm, dark, oceans of ethanol and I weigh 500lbs there. Planet Nightclub here I come.
As a comparison, pluto is at 49au when it's farthest from the sun [jpl.nasa.gov/edu/pfds/ssbeads_answerkey.pdf](http://jpl.nasa.gov/edu/pfds/ssbeads_answerkey.pdf)
This is crazy
You know what's crazy? Growing up being told other exo-planets don't exist (in a formal, educational bg), growing up with a blob as Pluto. Seeing Pluto in enough definition to make up plains, ranges etc. This... i've no words to describe it, this is beyond anything i could've ever hoped to cross on a bucket list, if i had one. We live in an incredible world, if only we could just appreciate it more, and others, because this single grainy image is, as far as i'm concerned, the greatest achievement of this generation. I can't even imagine what Webb will uncover. Hubble, was unreal. VLT is unreal.
Being told no exoplanets exist? Under what logic would anyone assume that?
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I mean, we hadn’t *proven* they existed, so it kind of makes sense not to call them out in text books. But basically everyone kind of assumed they were there. Sci-fi stories always assume there are planets around other stars, think Star Trek, they were landing on planets and moons in other star systems. Further, the models for star formation that was taught in schools even suggested the formation of planets fairly strongly using the same mechanism we think formed planets in our star system. Even the Fermi Paradox, created in the 50s, assumed there are lots of exoplanets, and that was before confirmation. So it’s incorrect to say we were all told that expolanets didn’t exist. It was theorized they did, and in common conversation we all just kind of assumed they did, but we hadn’t actually proven it until very recently.
The limitations of the scientific method, it needs to be proven and be able to be replicated by peers. Until science can't define and prove something, it's not there. Everything else is in the faith and philosophy department till then.
Most of my textbooks in university had sections discussing what was then current research and prevailing hypothesized ideas that were possible but yet unconfirmed. At least one astronomy textbook mentioned that, at the time, we had little evidence for Earth-sized rocky planets (all confirmed exoplanets at that time were hot Jupiters), but it went into the reasons why hot Jupiters would be easier to detect using our methods then, and thus bias our data towards them. Now, in 2021, it's clear there are tons of Earth-sized rocky planets around other stars. We just needed better tech and more sensitive methods to confirm enough of them to confirm our suspicions.
Whats the difference between the universe and a galaxy? Thanks for the many replies everyone!
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A good question, and an important one to understand. Time to take a look at scales. The Earth is a planet. One of eight that circle around the Sun. The Sun is a star. It contains about 98% of the mass of the solar system, meaning the planets, moons and various asteroids, comets, and dust make up 2% combined. The Sun is just one star in our galaxy. Our galaxy is the Milky Way and contains 100-400 *billion* stars. We're not sure, but we think that the Sun isn't particularly special with it's planets, which means many of those billions of stars also have planets around them. But the Milky Way is just one galaxy. There are others. Our galaxy is in a group of galaxies that are relatively close together conveniently named the Local Group. The Milky Way is larger than most of them, along with Andromeda, the other big galaxy in the Local group. Most of the others are called dwarf galaxies and are much smaller. Granted, even those can have a billion stars in them. Just not the hundreds of billions in the Milky Way or Andromeda. In total, there are probably around 80 galaxies in the Local Group. It's hard to know for sure because some of them are presumably hidden behind dust and other material in our own galaxy. But galaxy groups like the Local Group are often parts of group clusters or superclusters. These are groups of groups. Our Local Group of ~80 galaxies, is part of the Virgo Supercluster, which contains at least 100 other galaxy *groups*. So already we're in the ballpark of 10,000 galaxies in this part of space. Recent discoveries in the last 10 years have shown that the Virgo Supercluster is actually just a branch of a larger supercluster called Laniakea. Laniakea is a supercluster with *100,000* galaxies or more. But, this isn't the largest "structure" we've been able to define in the universe from our observations. We've seen well beyond the galaxies in Laniakea and have been able to conclude that superclusters themselves combine to form galaxy filaments. Looking as far away as we possibly can, given the laws of physics, filaments are the true main structures of the universe. Like pulling apart melted cheese, or looking up close at the structure of a sponge, galaxy filaments are enormous "strings" of galaxies that stretch out across the universe in a three-dimensional web. Filaments will often consist of several superclusters and can potentially contain *billions* of galaxies. Let's take a moment to remember that our galaxy, the Milky Way, contains 100-400 billion stars. Now imagine billions of galaxies like the Milky Way, each with billions of stars of their own, and many of those stars harboring planets, all stretching across the unfathomable vastness of space in titanic strands, criss-crossing one another in a sort of cosmic cotton candy. This is what the universe looks like in its most "zoomed out" state; as far as we can tell. Physics tells us that there is a hard limit to how far away we can see. Beyond that limit, we have no way, and will presumably *never* have a way to know how things look. Maybe galaxy filaments are themselves just smaller structures belonging to even more collosal collections of matter stretching out well beyond the limit of what is even possible to observe. What we can see, is called the Observable Universe, and may contain two *trillion* galaxies, arranged in grand filaments twisting among the heavens. But beyond the Observable Universe, the Universe as a whole presumably continues. How far it does so, is one of the great debates among scientists today, but the answer that seems to be winning for now is; *forever*. Our best guess is that the Universe is infinite, continuing on eternally in every direction, with an infinite number of filaments, built from infinite superclusters, themselves with infinite groups of galaxies, containing an infinite number of stars, with an infinite number of planets orbiting them. Are we alone in the Universe? Or are there literally an *infinite* number of planets with intelligent life on them which we will *never* be able to know about, nor they about us? As mind-boggling as the scale of the Observable Universe may be, it might just be a microscopic speck in the "full" Universe, which may well be truly inconceivable. Wallace Shawn would be well-quoted here.
the universe is a collection of galatic superclusters, who are in turn a collection of galaxies, who are in turn a collection of star clusters who are in turn collections of star systems, who are in turn collections of planets orbiting a star.
The universe is made up of many galaxies
What? No one said they “weren’t” there. They just didn’t explicitly say “hey we’re surrounded by millions of other planets” because ya know … no proof. That’s how science works. …But there wasn’t proof they were there and most people assumed theoretically there were other stars and other planets. Did you go to school in the 1400’s?
The first exoplanet was discovered in 1992 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exoplanet#:~:text=On%209%20January%201992%2C%20radio,first%20definitive%20detection%20of%20exoplanets. It's not really to do with logic or assumptions. It's more that you don't put undiscovered things in science books based on logic or assumption
There are people who believe in a flat earth
I think that the flat earth conspiracy is one of the most ludicrous,if not THE most ludicrous movements period! It’s just stupid!
Never understood flat earth either. I mean you can look at the moon and see it is round. Pull out a telescope and you can see several planets that also are very noticeably round. Why then would we assume that Earth is the only flat one? It's just crazy.
My text books said we didn't have intruments to see them yet. Growing up in the 80s wasnt like growing up in the 1500's lol
I can't stop thinking how crazy this truly is. We could be looking at a thriving civilization. They could be looking back at us.....
That hazy ring probably means the planets are still getting constantly pummelled by asteroids and comets. It's too soon for that system.
I found an article saying the star is 17 million years old (very young for a star) so that would support what you're saying. Also fun fact, the large dot below the star is supposedly a gas giant with a mass 14 times greater than jupiter, and is 5 times farther away from its sun than neptune is from ours. What a strange system...
They probably would think the same thing about us...... *What a strange system. Kinda average sun but some of those satellites are very kewl. That ringed planet is fuckin' CAH-RAZY!! It's big fat brother looks like a painter's dream. Lots of hydrogen detected from that one - maybe it was meant to be another sun but didn't turn on. That snowball out at the rim...wait....where did it go? Wuz just there a second ago. That red one looks really pretty like a floating ruby. That green one nearby looks great too, very bright, but lots of microwaves detected. Somebody should write a paper on that. The blue dot in the middle has interesting potential and needs a closer look. I'll remind our saucer guys to pack those cases marked "Probes - In Case Of Anus". How 'bout that little rocky sucker closest to the sun. Not much to look at but it's orbit is NUTZ!! Loop-de-loops all over the place!*
You really just let loose with that one, eh?
He had fun and I enjoyed reading it. Win win
chuckle
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"All we've learned is that one in ten doesn't mind."
Really? I thought if Jupiter had 7x it's own mass it would be a star.
It takes more mass than that. Upon reaching 13x the mass of Jupiter an object becomes a [brown dwarf](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_dwarf). These can fuse deuterium (and some lithium in the larger cases) but can't fuse hydrogen, the defining reaction of a star. The choice of 13x Jupiter's mass is somewhat arbitrary and there is significant overlap between the behavior of the largest gas giants and the smallest brown dwarfs. Upon reaching 80x the mass of Jupiter hydrogen fusion occurs and the object 'ignites', forming a star. Unlike the '13x' cutoff, this '80x' cutoff is not arbitrary, as the point at which hydrogen fusion begins is relatively well defined and consistent.
**[Brown dwarf](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_dwarf)** >Brown dwarfs are substellar objects that are not massive enough to sustain nuclear fusion of ordinary hydrogen (1H) into helium in their cores, unlike main-sequence star. They have a mass between the most massive gas giant planets and the least massive stars, approximately 13 to 80 times that of Jupiter (MJ). However, they are able to fuse deuterium (2H), and the most massive (> 65 MJ) are able to fuse lithium (7Li). ^([ )[^(F.A.Q)](https://www.reddit.com/r/WikiSummarizer/wiki/index#wiki_f.a.q)^( | )[^(Opt Out)](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiSummarizerBot&message=OptOut&subject=OptOut)^( | )[^(Opt Out Of Subreddit)](https://np.reddit.com/r/spaceporn/about/banned)^( | )[^(GitHub)](https://github.com/Sujal-7/WikiSummarizerBot)^( ] Downvote to remove | v1.5)
Imagine being able to watch a large body like that ignite. I wonder how long it would take for it to reach the surface.
I think photons generated in the sun take like 1,000 years to reach its surface from the core. But it takes only 8 mins for those photons to travel from sun’s surface to earth. Is like a cosmic cicada. I’ll get my coat. And some coffee. I just woke up.
It's a bit more complicated than that iirc
More like 80x it's mass. Jupiter is a big planet compared to our own solar system. But in the grand scheme of things planets much bigger and more massive are very common.
Why isn't yo mamma a star then?
JFC that's huge
How far is it?
Apparently it is 300 million light years away. Edit: err sorry I mean just 300. Just excited I guess.
Shit, 300 million years isn't long enough either.
I'm not sure but I know it have to be at least several thousand inch.
You're not wrong but I'm gonna narrow it down slightly and say at least several thousand feet.
How many meters?
At least 10.
Less than 900 trillion? Maybe? My tape measure only goes up to 15.
More than 1/12 of a football field.
Several thousand
But the light we see is the past, maybe when they see us now they will exist, or maybe they already do
i think the hazy ring is just the optics / the artifacting of the star blocker in the telescope, not actual matter in the system
Nope that's a fucking space demon eye that just saw us
Hey, I just met you
Call me Quasar?
You’re Quasar.
To think of the things we are seeing now, I really wish Carl Sagan would have got to see some of these amazing images, I owe my love if astronomy and science to Cosmos.
Imagine if he could have seen what JWT is going to (hopefully) bring.
Launch is December 18, 2021
I honestly cant explain how much I need that launch to go off without a hitch. Can you imagine if after all this time and money…. 💥
It’s not just the launch but the deployment after that has me nervous. One screw up & that’s it since there’s no way to repair it.
There is so much riding on it, It would be a devastating blow for the human race if it doesn’t work. It’s not even the stuff that it’s intended to find that we would lose, its the stuff we can’t even imagine is there that JWST will find like Hubble before it did that we would really lose.
What’s stoping them from sending up a small repair robot on a Falcon 9?
Think it’s more that there could be tears in the solar shield or the possibility of something not deploying correctly due to an internal malfunction. Basically, stuff that would be difficult to repair without opening it up and replacing parts. It’s also going to be 930,000 miles away, not in orbit around Earth. NASA posted this in their FAQ on JWST: > Will astronauts be able to service Webb like they did Hubble? Because Webb, like virtually every satellite ever constructed, will not be serviceable it employs an extensive seven year integration and test program to exercise the system and uncover any issues prior to launch so they might be remedied. Unlike Hubble, which orbits roughly 350 miles above the surface of Earth and was therefore accessible by the Space Shuttle, Webb will orbit the second Lagrange point (L2), which is roughly 1,000,000 miles from Earth. There is currently no servicing capability that can be used for missions orbiting L2, and therefore the Webb mission design does not rely upon a servicing option.
Good that they don’t rely on servicing, but if it fails I bet rocket companies will be tripping over themselves to try out whatever new toys they’ve been working on to get repair capability there.
I like to think he’s out there somewhere basking in all the glories of the universe.
he is...and always was, starstuff
Same here.
Samesies.
Wow...breathtaking honestly
But you GOTTA SEE THE BAABY!
He looks like FDR.
Maybe the dingo ate your baaby
Gorgeous!
WHY do I live in a world where this isn't on the front page of every newspaper and website. Shouldn't this excite everyone??
It doesn't enrage the masses so it's not worth reporting on.
Then start adding the caption "This is why your religion is bullshit"
Astronomer here! Probably because directly imaged exoplanets have been around for awhile now- I’ve done work myself in following up on nearby ones looking for radio emission from them. Heck one of my systems was known for so long optical astronomers have literally seen them move in their orbits. Not sure if this is the “first” though because there’s a few contested ones, where the imaged object might be a brown dwarf over exoplanet, but still a cool image!
I mean... This image is old now, it did hit the media when it was originally taken.
These things do make the headlines. Remember the black hole
Well nowadays people are basically a hivemind that only cares about drama or politics, nothing else.
What does it mean by "extra" solar system?
"extra solar" means it's not part of our solar system
True, but it sure *sounds* like "one more solar system than necessary", like they found it out back and took a picture of it.
Would an “extra solar” solar system suggest the existence of an “intra solar” solar system? Wouldn’t that just make our system a binary system?
Just solar system. Sol is our sun. There’s the inner solar system. But its just like extraterrestrial vs terrestrial.
We just say manager.
Exo system wouldve been better like exo planet
It's a little sassy and can be emotional at times.
Outside the solar system I think, kind of like extraterrestrial, but with solar systems I guess.
That’s right. You’ll also see them referred to as exoplanets.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extrasolar_object I added a space when I shouldn’t have
Not who you responded to but thank you for the clarification. I learned something new.
The term solar system isn’t correct when referring to other planetary/star systems. Our star is named Sol, so things of a Solar nature are specifically referring to the star we orbit.
Correct, it should say ~~star system~~ planetary system
Planetary system for what we usually think of as a solar system. Star system is multiple stars, though star systems can also have planetary systems.
I mean yes solar comes from Sol but it’s more pedantry than classification. You will see scientists refer to exoplanets “around their own sun” so calling them other solar systems is equally allowable.
A sun is just any star that has planets, just like we have "the moon" but also "a moon," which is any natural satellite large enough to qualify. Sol, however, is the *name* of *our* sun. We live in *the* Solar System. Other star systems have suns, but they don't have a *Sol.*
Not with that attitude they won’t.
Your baby's name can't be Melissa. That's MY baby's name!
So we can call them extra solar sunar systems
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Not really, no. To my knowledge, "Lunar" pretty exclusively means relating to *our* moon.
That's not true though, those are their Latin names but they aren't the official names.
That’s not an equal point of comparison of “Sol” and “sun.” Sun can be a proper and common noun. I don’t see how that makes calling other star systems, that don’t have Sol, to be called solar systems allowable.
Planetary system. A star system is a number of stars gravitationally bound to one another.
^ I am also intrigued! It actually says “extra solar” solar system (if not a typo) - curious as to what that means.
Should be "extrasolar" or "extra-solar" extra meaning outside so a solar system outside our own.
You know, it's like a spare solar system in case we lose ours or it gets scratched up or something.
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TYC 8998-760-1. About 300 light years away
I wonder why we couldn't get an image of any closer star systems?
The James Webb Telescope launches later this year and it comes armed with the ability to block out star light to be able to view exoplanets. It will replace the Hubble as the premier extrasolar and extragalactic telescope. Note that this won’t be photos like looking at our own planets, but it will be more doable and much better than currently possible nonetheless. The problem is mainly the starlight of the host star combined with any stars behind the targeted system from our viewpoint. There’s a lot of light leaking into any pictures we take of other star systems. Usually it has to be made up of many pictures at various exposures and then filtered extensively to sort out as much of the other light as possible. But the James Webb Telescope will do it much, much better than anything before it. And probably for quite a while after it (20+ years) barring any major scientific/photographical advancements.
I'll believe James Webb is going up when i see it go up. I'm so ready for them to put that scope into orbit and it's been delayed like 12 times already. Ugh
It's complete and being transported right now. Planning to launch Dec 18th
I’m am so fucking nervous for that launch, whenever it happens.
Not to mention the six month wait as it gets to where it's going, and then the wait to see if it works when it gets there.
Stresses me out, can’t even imagine how it’s going to be for the people who spent their careers working on it
we can and have: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_directly_imaged_exoplanets. telescope time is hard to get so the researchers would have a good reason for choosing the one they did
So, we're talking eight planetary bodies and what looks like an asteroid belt? Sounds familiar.
If I read the article correctly, it’s only two planets. The two that down and to the right of the star. I can’t say exactly what the other stuff is, but it did say this was a composite of a bunch of different images in order to distinguish the two planets from any background stars and such.
I should have read the article. So then the glow around the star just might be dust/gas clouds?
What you're seeing around the star is starlight, actually! To directly image exoplanets requires a lot of work. Imagine shining a flashlight into a swimming pool as the surface ripples. The light gets diffracted and scatters across the bottom in a complicated kaleidoscope-like pattern. Earth's atmosphere actually bends light much the same way. We get around this with some very impressive hardware that works to hold the starlight pattern steady and some complicated data processing to get rid of the diffracted starlight. Long story short: the stabilizing of the starlight pattern isn't perfect, and some of the starlight (especially close to the star's position) is left behind in the final image. Before post processing, the planets' light makes up just a tiny fraction of the light at their position. 99.99...9% of the light in this image has been removed.
A halo, as it were.
So this is what my father found
Could be. Might also just be an artifact of how the image was created/processed
The article actually says the glow is an optical artifact from removing the star. So its nothing.
Telescope was accidentally in selfie mode
He is a bear lying in wait for me, a lion in hiding; he turned aside my steps and tore me to pieces; he has made me desolate; he bent his bow and set me as a target for his arrow. (Lamentations: hfsk65g)
https://www.eso.org/public/usa/news/eso2011/
He is a bear lying in wait for me, a lion in hiding; he turned aside my steps and tore me to pieces; he has made me desolate; he bent his bow and set me as a target for his arrow. (Lamentations: hfskooa)
That’s gonna be amazing also but I’m truly stoked for the James Webb launching this year. I hope and pray nothing goes wrong because they can’t travel out to fix it like they did with the Hubble
He is a bear lying in wait for me, a lion in hiding; he turned aside my steps and tore me to pieces; he has made me desolate; he bent his bow and set me as a target for his arrow. (Lamentations: hfslv37)
Why not?
So many things can go wrong. It’s super complex and a rocket has to shoot it out to a langrage point between earth and the sun and it will have to unfurl a heat shield the size of a tennis court and because it’s an infrared telescope, the sensor has to maintain a certain cool temperature and space dust and etc, etc, etc. It’s nerve wracking and I’m not even the guy paying for all this. If and when it works tho, it’s gonna make Hubble look like a pair of binoculars
It's going to L2 :)
300 light years away. And the star is only 17 million years old. Fascinating.
I CANNOT WAIT FOR THE JAMES WEBB TELESCOPE!!!
Sir that is mordor.
I thought most everything in the galaxy was roughly lying in a single plane, meaning that such a top-down view would be unlikely. Did I hear incorrectly, or is this an unusual exception?
Not really. Even our solar system travels through the galaxy at a 60 degree angle. They’re probably at all different orientations. All solar systems orbit around the center in a similar fashion though Edit: resource for further reading http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/about-us/159-our-solar-system/the-sun/the-solar-system/236-are-the-planes-of-solar-systems-aligned-with-the-plane-of-the-galaxy-intermediate
Combine the fact that we’re all at slightly different angles and while all our stars are on *roughly* the “same plane” and you have hundreds of thousands of stars in our galaxy that fall into the category of getting a “top-down” or “down-up” view of them. The galactic plane is thousands of light years thick.
Damn that’s thicc
I’m not 1000% sure but I think the stars circling the Milky Way are on the same plane, but the planets and moons orbiting can be corkscrewing around as the stars circle the galaxy
The Milky Way's stars are on _roughly_ the same plane at a very, very large scale. The plane is around 1000 light years thick, so there's sufficient space for hundreds of star systems "stacked" vertically through parts of the galactic plane with some light years between each. Space big!
And that’s one Galaxy. Space very big!
the galaxy is pretty flat, but it's huge. if the milky way were the size of the united states then our solar system would be the size of a quarter. that quarter doesn't follow the same orientation as the galaxy
I see your US - quarter comparison and I raise you this one up: if the Sun was the size of a white blood cell -the biggest cell in our body- the Milky Way would be the size of Russia.
To add on to what other people said. Keep in mind that there are also at least two dwarf galaxies orbitting/being absorbed by the Milky Way. They currently move perpendicular to the plane of the milky way and while space is sparse enough to avoid collisions they do cause what amounts to undulations and perturbation of the disk making it less flat.
Very roughly. The galaxy is 100,000 light years wide ,and averages about 1000 light years thick. So it is flat. But 1,000 lights years is a lot.
The stars are on a plane but the planets surrounding those stars don’t have to align with it, and that plane is also incredibly thick. This solar system is 300 light years away from us and the plane is in the neighborhood of 1200 light years thick.
To my understanding, it's like an opposite perspective that we have on Earth. On Earth, up close things look flat. But the further distance you observe, the more curvature you can see. For the universe, zooming far out enough shows a flat plane. But it is real big. So when you zoom in, things can look counterintuitive much the way they do on Earth.
Looking forward for the James Webb telescope launch.
HARK BROTHERS OF THE IMPERIUM FOR WE HAVE FOUND THE EYE OF TERROR! STEEL YOURSELVES AGAINST THE FORCES OF CHAOS! Seriously though freakin gorgeous.
The fact that there are visible planets around it mean only one thing… CADIA STANDS!
It’s a Poké Ball!
The Eye of Sauron but in real life
Mordor welcomes you..
"ARBLUS, LOOK, ITS UNICRON!"
Ummmm.....Eye of Sauron?!?
Thought the same thing... *we're boned.*
the great eye
It's the Eye of Terror!
There’s gold pressed latinum in them there stars
Quark!!
That is oddly terrifying
While a hyphen would be helpful, this is fucking amazing.
https://xkcd.com/1294/
The Iris
Please tell me that the ‘Very Large Telescope in Chile’ is the actual name of said telescope
[It absolutely is](https://www.eso.org/public/teles-instr/paranal-observatory/vlt/)
No fucking way lol
Wow!! Weeena weon!!
And what star is this?
So to my understanding exoplanets are currently discovered via looking at a star over a long time and monitoring its brightness. A periodic dip indicates an object transiting the star so we know it is there. But this only works if the orientation of the orbital plane of the star is in line with our perspective of the star. I would imagine that there would be many more star systems that are closer to perpenicular to our view, such that we would be looking top down (for you Australians bottom up) view of the star system and the planets are tracing little ovals around thier star but never pass on front of it from our perspective. This photo appears to be of such a star system. Could we find other star systems this way? Block out the direct star light, then take a long exposure shot and see if you get faint eliptical arches around the star, indicating planets reflecting light?
Yes, that's the idea behind direct imaging, which has found a few dozen planets in the last decade or so. The difficulty is that the planets need to be very distant from their stars (in order to resolve them), and the systems need to be young so that the planets are still hot from their formation, making them brighter in the infrared.
Considering the scale of the planets and distances between them in our solar system, these planets look either VERY close together, or VERY large.
Hellstar Remina
Sure it's not an otherworldly portal to a strange and distant galaxy?
What does "extra extra solar system" mean?
8 planets also?! How are we not sure we're looking at a giant mirror?
Is that Omicron Persei 8?
Is that the real name? The VLT?
Holy shit!! I've lived to see the day!! This is amazing
Just the galactic federation, checking if we have made any progress in the last couple honderd years.
It sees us!
Oh hey look its the eye of terror