Thursday, August 13, 2015

51 Eridani b

The Gemeni Planet Imager snapped a photo of a planet 96 light years away, 51 Eridani b. 


The planet is hot and glowing in the infrared.  It is the dot next to the "b" in the image above.  The GPI uses optical tricks to mask most of the light from the star it orbits (resulting in the circular mottled artifacts in the image), which at this distance would otherwise swamp out the light coming from the planet.  It is orbiting 51 Eridani at about the distance of Saturn from the sun. 

It is easy to be underwhelmed with all the news coming out about planets outside of our solar system in recent years.  Just dwell on this for a moment.  If someone had asked you, would you think it was possible to see the light, from a planet, 9.08 × 1015 kilometers (5.64 × 1014 miles) away? 

Using nuclear exhaust and traveling at 10% of the speed of light it would take a probe about 1,000 years to travel that distance (although less time would occur on the probe because of relativistic time dilation) to get its own close up picture. 

No comments: