Apparent first picture of extra-solar planet taken bt Hubble.

LINK

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Ignorance is the night of the mind, but a night without moon and star. - Confucius

One should be cautious in interpreting this image. In 1998, others using the Hubble Space Telescope claimed to have imaged an extrasolar planet. When its spectrum was obtained, however, it turned out to be a mere background star.

Still, it gives us all something to chew over.
Does anyone know how long the follow up observations will take to see if it's really a planet or just a background star?

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I have a question... suppose it is an extrasolar planet...

whats the pattern for nomenclature? say we find planets around Vega (i know.. we can't, that's why i'm supposeing). say we finf 1 planet and call it Vega a, and then a second planet, farther out and call that vega b. now suppose we find a third planet inside the orbits of the first two and call it 'c'. this means that from in to out (the way we think about orbitals) it comes out as vega c, a, b.

that can get really annoying when you are trying to keep planets straight.

An astute observation. This is exactly the situation with the rings of Saturn. I think the excuse is "it's the oder in which they were discovered." :roll: I got 5 bucks sez the situation will be agravated once Cassini gets there. :-?

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It's just one of those damn things of which there are many few. -- Dan Blocker

thinking back on it a little more, i think that the best way might be by albedio. Do it like you would stars - odds are that's the order you are going to find them in anyway.

This topic is already discussed here.

Looking at the picture the most amazing thing is that the planet appears to be square. Has Hubble found the Bizzaro World?

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The Devil offered me power. I told him I preferred aperture.

Aaaaigh! Borg Cube!!!

If it's a planet, it's a dead, sterilized planet.

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Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.

Maybe it's Gort's 'Thargoydia'! The only square planet in the universe... Where's Captain Kremmin when you need him?

"Look Carla! There on the scanner! It's Uranus!'

"Oh Captain! You're so bold!"

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any more information about this one?

If it's really 5-10 Jupiter masses as the article suggests, and is glowing brightly enough in the infrared to show up on Hubble's infrared imaging system, then wouldn't it be a brown dwarf instead of a planet?

Now wait just a cotton-pickin' minute here.

According to the first paragraph in the above link:
Yet, according to the space.com article on this subject at http://www.space.com/scienceastronom...ay_040510.html:
So which is it? 30-55 ly, or 100 ly?

Boundary between "giant planet" and "brown dwarf" is pretty arbitrary. Most common definition is 13 Jupiter masses - where deuterium fusion begins.

There are two variables in the temperature/luminosity of one of these objects (Jovians or brown dwarfs) - not only mass, but age, matters. Both are expected to be quite hot (and bright) while still young, but cool dramatically as much of their initial heat is radiated. This entered into the reports of brown dwarfs in the Orion Nebula cluster, for example. Some white dwarfs can give a clue to their ages, from mass plus how far down the cooling path they've gotten since being produced from a former stellar core. And yes indeed, this does all depend on models of how the structure of these things works...