Quote:
Originally Posted by Sporally
Amazing... And with the Hedonic Treadmill theory i'm already forgetting about it  But there is something i don't get here. OK, so today it was annonced that Formalhaut B was discovered being the first direct image of an exoplanet. |
I seem to recall the first direct imaging of exoplanets being announced several times already. I think these are the first images of objects that aren't arguably brown dwarfs (well, HR 8799c/d
could be over 13M
J).
Formalhaut b must be shining by the heat of its formation if its T
eff is 400K. It receives about as much energy from Formalhaut as Neptune does from the sun. Interestingly it appears to have been
predicted by Alice C. Quillen in 2006:
the planet has a mass between that of Neptune and that of Saturn, a semi-major axis of approximately 119 AU and longitude of periastron and eccentricity, 0.1. The values for
a and
e recently published by
Kalas et al. agree completely, though their projected mass is considerably higher. I wonder if this gives her a share of the credit? To be fair Kalas
predicted planets around Formalhaut in 2005.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Sporally
I saw the press conferance and they talked a lot about the planet system with 3 planets that you linked to. And following your the link you posted just before the press conferance began i see that you (who started that post aswell) mention those three planets as if they had just been annonced today. Or am i wrong here? Those 3 were first but already had been disqualified for being exoplanets - how can it be that they haven't been mentioned before today? Do we have a total of 4 exoplanets imaged directly on the same day or what am i misunderstanding?  |
I can't make sense of that.