More news
Wow. When news about me rains, it pours. There are two new pictures being released that I took, and normally I would have waited awhile between these two posts, but one of them is potentially quite exciting.
First a more artistic picture, the so-called red rectangle, a rather odd nebulae given its shape. But that's nothing. Have at this...
First they had me taking pictures of Sedna. No biggie, I can do that with two gyros shut down. But now the sceintists are excited because I might have captured the first image of an extra-solar planet! Now don't get too excited, because this is a new imaging method that they're using in an attempt to view dim objects in close proximity to stars (aka, planets), but there's still the chance that I captured the image or either a planet or brown dwarf in orbit around a white dwarf star. Here's an article from space.com if you want to read more about it.
But Hubble, you may ask, haven't we seen extra-solar planets before? The answer is no we haven't. We can detect the effects of these planets on their stars, but haven't been able to actually image the planets themselves. Problem is that planets are extremely tiny (if I did capture this one, it's 10x the size of Jupiter, and still just one pixel big on a processed image) and don't put out their own light, so it's hard to get them on film. Needless to say, this could be pretty darn huge.
First a more artistic picture, the so-called red rectangle, a rather odd nebulae given its shape. But that's nothing. Have at this...
First they had me taking pictures of Sedna. No biggie, I can do that with two gyros shut down. But now the sceintists are excited because I might have captured the first image of an extra-solar planet! Now don't get too excited, because this is a new imaging method that they're using in an attempt to view dim objects in close proximity to stars (aka, planets), but there's still the chance that I captured the image or either a planet or brown dwarf in orbit around a white dwarf star. Here's an article from space.com if you want to read more about it.
But Hubble, you may ask, haven't we seen extra-solar planets before? The answer is no we haven't. We can detect the effects of these planets on their stars, but haven't been able to actually image the planets themselves. Problem is that planets are extremely tiny (if I did capture this one, it's 10x the size of Jupiter, and still just one pixel big on a processed image) and don't put out their own light, so it's hard to get them on film. Needless to say, this could be pretty darn huge.