The creator of the GIF above used a data from a range of different telescopes and wavelengths, whereas I made this with using data only from same telescope (Keck), instrument, and wavelength (3.5 microns; near infrared).
That’s right. We only have images take every year or so, so I did a motion interpolation between the images using Keplers laws. Diffraction close in gets pulled around by the interpolation.
Worth being very clear that this is not a real video of the system, it's 10 static images with a few hundred interpolated "fake" frames. Still very cool though.
It indeed is very worth being very clear about the limited data that makes the images.
It is also very cool.
..Nothing to add, simply echoing your sentiment :-)
The Roman Coronagraph is designed to detect planets 100 million times fainter than their stars, which is 100 to 1,000 times better than existing space-based coronagraphs. The Roman Coronagraph will be capable of directly imaging reflected starlight from a planet akin to Jupiter in size, temperature, and distance from its parent star.
A. I watched a documentary on the plane about SpaceX where they showed the Pez dispenser working and it was amazing.
B. You could have multiple panels operate as a swarm. There could be many "mirrors" that focus images on one central "collector". That would be larger than any telescope that needs to be shipped as one unit e.g. James-Webb.
If this remains a long term design limitation it'll be interesting to see if people design satellite hardware that consists of multiple individual rectangular slab sized things (generally same size/shape per piece as starlink v3 test satellites which have unfolding PV/antenna), that can latch together once dispensed, and further unfold.
Such an architecture might not be an impossible design consideration if the goal is to have something big like the sun-shade/cold side of the Webb telescope.
I can't imagine that there will not be other versions. The Pez dispenser is just solving the problem at hand. Eventually, I wouldn't be surprised to see cargo bay doors similar to the shuttle's.
Yeah, they'll have more versions for sure. There are two main designs that have been discussed / shown before (one where the entire nose hinges "backwards" and exposes the payload, and one that looks like the shuttle bay doors). And I think that for NASA decadal projects (i.e. JWST-like big telescopes) they could even go with a non-reusable Starship, with "regular" fairings that get dropped.
That seems likely. Best guess is the relatively small slot sized door is a cautious design while they're working out issues with re-entry heating and stresses and sacrificing ships into the ocean. Once they're very confident they have the configuration for the 'hot' side of the starship working well on re-entry (and probably after they've returned and caught a few), it could be expanded in size.
It is not a long term limitation. One might design any number of stages to fly in place of Starship on top of the Super Heavy booster.
Also, large science payloads can be launched by SLS. Back in the days of the Ares program, there were proposals to launch an 8 meter reflector (ATLAST-8m)[1] using Ares V. SLS anticipates payloads of such size as well.
So there are at least two viable platforms on which enormous space mirrors might launch, and one of them is likely to be highly cost effective. It's up to the science establishment to propose such missions and get them funded.
Amazing. Scrolling down one of the comments has an animation of starts around the center of the Milky Way. I have seen a few short ones of nebulae. There should be much much more of this sort of thing.
I appreciate that scientist are not always after the pretty pictures. They can be expensive, do not always give the data needed, and the experiments do not always produce data that has obvious pretty picture potential. Still, for the average non professional scientist (me) the pictures are about all I will ever get out of the science.
The galactic center data actually proved there was a supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, and weighed it precisely from those stars motions. The name of the account that posted that animation (Sagittarius A*) is the name of that supermassive black hole.
When you think about it, it's so mindblowing that we humans can study and talk about these unimaginably large objects in the universe. Yet they just exist there regardless of what we do or think about them and will continue to exist way past whatever happens to our species.
The term I would use instead is that the data provided observational support of a hypothesis. It didn't "prove" anything- proofs only exist in math. (yes, I know people use "prove" is colloquial way, but it's misleading, especially in observational work where you can't control variables to find causality.
Black holes probably disappear due to Hawking radiation, but I don’t think we have observational evidence and the process takes forever for the black holes you can observe.
A good chunk of science communication centres around how one conveys the wow factor to folks who aren't already obsessed with the particular field. Images like this really help sell it to the rest of us
> There should be much much more of this sort of thing.
As more telescopes come online, there'll be more data available for this type of stuff. You gotta realize that when a telescope only looks at something once per year, it takes a long time to gather enough data for these types of images to be created. My go to example is the motion of stars around SagA*.
Somewhat related, but probably more fascinating: a time lapse animation of stars orbiting the blackhole at the center of our galaxy (Sagittarius A*) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TF8THY5spmo
Also check out the Simulated Observation of the Solar System by the Habitable Worlds Observatory (under "Videos"), expected to be launched in the 2040s, the first to be able to detect Earth-like planets around Sun-like stars! https://habitableworldsobservatory.org/multimedia
Space and the enormity of it breaks your mind when you start thinking about it.
The star in the middle of the animation, is approximately 20AU (Astronomical Units) in size looking at the scale line. 20AU is approximately 1.8b miles/3b kilometres or approximately the distance from the Sun to Uranus.
If Google's correct, if everyone on Earth lived on that star - each and every one of us could have a backyard larger than the surface area of Earth ;p
I don't think you should infer the radius of the star from the blacked out region. I think they just do that because the luminosity of the star is so intense it would blow away the sensitivity needed to see the planets. So they set everything to zero for a certain zone on the lens/sensor. It's not the physical surface of the star.
There are a handful of known red supergiant stars around 15 AU in diameter, 20 AU would be pushing past the boundaries of what we believe would be possible.
The star in the video, HR 8799, is about 50% larger than the sun.
It looks like HR8799 that the animation is based on is about 1.5x the radius of the sun.
That being said, my silly point still holds - there are stars that are truly massive. Stephenson 2-18 is approximately the size I mentioned, which is genuinely impossible to comprehend.
Yeah, but remember that those red supergiants' outer envelope is extremely sparse. The density is compared to the very upper layers of Earth's atmosphere - basically vacuum. Around 90% of a supergiants' radius is taken up by that ultra-thin gas envelope.
Wow, in terms of angle, how far are these planets separated from the star?
I always thought we would never be able to image something like that. The distances would be too small and the contrast too large to figure something at the resolution we can get on earth. I'll need to read up on how this was done.
The scale bar (20 AU) represents 20 time the distance between the Earth and the sun. This star is about 41 parsecs away, so the angular size of that scale bar is about half an arcsec. (One degree is split into 60 arcminutes, one arcminute into 60 arcseconds. Just like a clock).
That angle is about the diameter of a US quarter coin seen from 11km (7mi) away.
Yea, the planets are gigantic, and in distant orbits from their star. I don't think we even have the ability yet to directly image exoplanets much smaller than, say, Saturn, or closer to their stars than Saturn.
The noise from the blocked-out star noticably decreases in 2017. Is that due to changes in the stars' activity cycle, or is that due to better processing/capture technology?
I swear I'm not trying to criticize, but, uh--why only 10 or so photos? Why not just film it long term? Is it our position in earth's orbit that only lets us image that system once a year or so?
I would also assume it's not just "okay hit the button, okay there's that snapshot", it's likely sitting there collecting photons for a _while_ to get each picture.
The instrument is operated according to a detailed schedule that spans years. It takes a committee to create the schedule, and each separately scheduled observation is then organized by a team, with different teams organizing different observations.
They cannot simply aim the instrument at one system and forego everything else. The result you see is a campaign credited to at least four team members, and enough schedule time committed to make approximately one observation per year.
What are the odds of there being smaller exoplanets that are effectively being outshone by the others? Since each one these is more massive than Jupitar.
I will just say that this short movie is something most beautiful I've seen in last several years. To be able to see this, for real, not as a side-effect to the star is absolutely mind blowing.
From ~0:04 - 0:05, two dots at ~10 and 8 o'clock fade in and out simultaneously, with roughly the size and brightness of the planets. They peak at observation ~2016-07-06. Any idea what they are?
Their balanced position and simultaneous changes make them seem like an artifact of the imaging.
They're present for multiple dates at the bottom, and fade in and out. Are those dates and the fading fabricated as some sort of intermediate state and inserted into the animation? I did briefly look for something stating how the animation was made but didn't see anything.
Also, they are too regular in position and in their timeing (simultaneous) to be random noise, but could be an artifact of some part of the imaging and processing chain.
Yes, they were not very clear about this but my understanding is that there are only 10 real images, i.e. less than one per (earth) year. All other frames are interpolated, which can pretty accurately animate the positions of the planets, but is presumably completely inaccurate for anything else.
Comments (61)
https://sefffal.github.io/images/orbital-animation.mp4
The creator of the GIF above used a data from a range of different telescopes and wavelengths, whereas I made this with using data only from same telescope (Keck), instrument, and wavelength (3.5 microns; near infrared).
That was originally assumed to be non-zero but very low. Modern planet hunting techniques have revised that number to be close to 100%. [1]
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation#:~:text=Fractio...
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/the-roman-coronagraph-inst...
The Roman Coronagraph is designed to detect planets 100 million times fainter than their stars, which is 100 to 1,000 times better than existing space-based coronagraphs. The Roman Coronagraph will be capable of directly imaging reflected starlight from a planet akin to Jupiter in size, temperature, and distance from its parent star.
As long as the telescope can fit through the Starlink Pez dispenser.
B. You could have multiple panels operate as a swarm. There could be many "mirrors" that focus images on one central "collector". That would be larger than any telescope that needs to be shipped as one unit e.g. James-Webb.
Such an architecture might not be an impossible design consideration if the goal is to have something big like the sun-shade/cold side of the Webb telescope.
It is not a long term limitation. One might design any number of stages to fly in place of Starship on top of the Super Heavy booster.
Also, large science payloads can be launched by SLS. Back in the days of the Ares program, there were proposals to launch an 8 meter reflector (ATLAST-8m)[1] using Ares V. SLS anticipates payloads of such size as well.
So there are at least two viable platforms on which enormous space mirrors might launch, and one of them is likely to be highly cost effective. It's up to the science establishment to propose such missions and get them funded.
[1] https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20100004890
I appreciate that scientist are not always after the pretty pictures. They can be expensive, do not always give the data needed, and the experiments do not always produce data that has obvious pretty picture potential. Still, for the average non professional scientist (me) the pictures are about all I will ever get out of the science.
This work earned the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2020/summary/
As more telescopes come online, there'll be more data available for this type of stuff. You gotta realize that when a telescope only looks at something once per year, it takes a long time to gather enough data for these types of images to be created. My go to example is the motion of stars around SagA*.
DrBecky's video on it: https://youtube.com/watch?v=z2JIkAPcdnU
The star in the middle of the animation, is approximately 20AU (Astronomical Units) in size looking at the scale line. 20AU is approximately 1.8b miles/3b kilometres or approximately the distance from the Sun to Uranus.
If Google's correct, if everyone on Earth lived on that star - each and every one of us could have a backyard larger than the surface area of Earth ;p
The star in the video, HR 8799, is about 50% larger than the sun.
It looks like HR8799 that the animation is based on is about 1.5x the radius of the sun.
That being said, my silly point still holds - there are stars that are truly massive. Stephenson 2-18 is approximately the size I mentioned, which is genuinely impossible to comprehend.
I always thought we would never be able to image something like that. The distances would be too small and the contrast too large to figure something at the resolution we can get on earth. I'll need to read up on how this was done.
That angle is about the diameter of a US quarter coin seen from 11km (7mi) away.
The instrument is operated according to a detailed schedule that spans years. It takes a committee to create the schedule, and each separately scheduled observation is then organized by a team, with different teams organizing different observations.
They cannot simply aim the instrument at one system and forego everything else. The result you see is a campaign credited to at least four team members, and enough schedule time committed to make approximately one observation per year.
Their balanced position and simultaneous changes make them seem like an artifact of the imaging.
Also, they are too regular in position and in their timeing (simultaneous) to be random noise, but could be an artifact of some part of the imaging and processing chain.