Extrasolar planet caught on camera

Tonight I discovered that the first actual images of an extrasolar planet have been captured by the Hubble Space Telescope. Which may sound strange to those of you who have been keeping up with news about our space telescope: it’s currently broken; a shuttle mission to repair it had been scheduled for last month, but was postponed when it was discovered that further repairs were needed. So how is it that the Advanced Camera for Surveys, the very instrument that isn’t working at the moment (and hasn’t been since 2007!), was able to capture these incredible images? Well, like most astronomical work, the observations were made quite some ago. It was the interpretation that took until just this week. From the NASA press release:

Kalas and his team first used Hubble to photograph Fomalhaut in 2004, and made the unexpected discovery of its debris disk, which scatters Fomalhaut’s starlight. At the time they noted a few bright sources in the image as planet candidates. A follow-up image in 2006 showed that one of the objects is moving through space with Fomalhaut but changed position relative to the ring since the 2004 exposure. The amount of displacement between the two exposures corresponds to an 872-year-long orbit as calculated from Kepler’s laws of planetary motion.

It’s been a while since I’ve done any intense astronomical observation, and I wasn’t even sure I’d remember my way around the sky, but tonight’s news inspired me to head out onto the back deck with Marcella’s binoculars and take a brief cruise around just to see what I could see. After all, at one point I could rattle off all the constellations visible from the northern hemisphere and give a list of their most prominent celestial objects. That knowledge can’t all have disappeared, can it? Is the intellectual pursuit of astronomy somewhat like riding a bike?

I couldn’t have asked for better weather to find out. It’s warm again here in Boca; just Florida’s way of reminding us that it’s still very early in the dry season, and although the humidity was low for a while, and the temps were abnormally low thanks to a passing cold front, it’s still possible to have daytime highs in the mid-80s and overnight lows in the mid-70s. Oy! There were a few low clouds, too, typical for Florida when it’s warm, but they pass by quickly enough. And the full moon was still low enough in the sky not to be lighting everything up with its glow.

I reacquainted myself, first of all, with Fomalhaut, hanging alone down there in the southern sky, no bright stars anywhere nearby. I tried to see the dust ring, but my imagination isn’t quite powerful enough. 

My next target was the Summer Triangle, because I could see Cygnus hanging up nearly directly overhead. Lyra, with bright Vega, was easy to find, as was the famous (to amateur astronomers, at least) double-double, Epsilon Lyrae. After that I scouted around for the great square of Pegasus, which wasn’t too hard to find either. And, in spite of the growing light of the moon, I was able to make out M31 in Andromeda without too much difficulty at all.

I guess wandering around the night sky from the comfort of a lounge chair on your own deck is a bit like riding a bicycle, after all…

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