It wasn’t that long ago that a science teacher would have told students that there was no evidence of planets around other star systems. Even more recently, they might have said that while we’ve seen evidence of extra-solar planets, we would never be able to see them directly. But that’s all changed. [Jason Wang] has several videos that use images taken over years to visualize the orbit of several large exoplanets.
Of course, some extrapolation is involved. According to [Jason]:
We unfortunately do not have the luxury of watching these planets every night and record them. However, these planets move slowly, with orbital periods at least decades long, and predictably following Kepler’s laws. We can use a technique called motion interpolation to reconstruct what the image should look like using images taken before and after the date we are interested in. Motion interpolation is a technique commonly found in video editing and in modern TVs.
You have to be a patient photographer, apparently. One video has 30 images taken over 17 years, for example. Another has 10 images from the Keck Observatory taken over 12 years.
The work has fed scientific papers like this one or this one. While it might be more fun to see these star systems from the bridge of your favorite starship, this is probably as close as you are going to get.
We find both the prospect of exoplanets and the technology used to find them exciting
Praise Keck!
PBS Spacetime did a thing on how to take pictures of exoplanets good enough to map them, using the sun as a massive gravitational lens: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4d0EGIt1SPc
This frustrated me to no end when I was a kid. Even as a young child, once I learnt stars where just other “suns”, I knew there had to be more planets than just the ones in our star system. But the adults I dealt with were adamant where were no other plants, often loosing their shit when I tried to explain/insist, just because we didn’t detect any yet doesn’t mean they are not there…
But then again, my science teacher has firmly in the sky-fairy squad.
Not all of us in the “sky-fairy squad” (I’ll have to remember that term and use it at my next elders’ meeting!) would ignore the obvious. Just sayin’….
LOL!
Yeah, this was ~40 years ago, in a rather religious tiny rural village, in a country which at the time had religious laws. That same science teacher also taught some of our mandatory religious studies classes. One time he tried to teach a version of intelligent design as a thinly veil physics lesson – calculating the probability of life precursors to form to prove god exists… I love science, and hate the fact he did that. I think exoplanets was sensitive to religious folks, something about undermining their more bogus theories/propaganda.
I appreciate that there are open minded folks in the sky-fairy squad, thanks!
[Oh, the country was Scotland for those wondering.]
The pentagon is the new Scotland then. (NOW, NEW and IMPROVED with more ARMAMENT.)