When I was a boy nothing fired my imagination more than the space program. My mother got me up before dawn in California so I could watch Alan Shepherd, Virgil Grissom, John Glenn and the others of our first astronauts "blast off" into the great beyond. Now, remarkable news has just come in of the first visual image of a planet orbiting a star other than our sun. This achievement owes its realization to the amazing capabilities of the Hubble Space Telescope and some remarkable persistence by the astronomical team on the job.
The star Fomalhaut is a main sequence white dwarf star, similar to our sun, about 25 light years from Earth. By astronomical measures that is pretty close to our own neighborhood, though in more familiar terms it is a long way- over 150 trillion miles. As early as the 1980s Fomalhaut was observed to have a gas and debris disc around it, evidence of an early solar system still in formation. It is now thought the star and its system may only be 200 million years old. That is mere infancy compared to the 4.6 billion year age of our own system.
A planet has now been identified even in visual light. It is about three times the mass of Jupiter, orbiting over 10.7 billion miles from its star. That is much farther away than Pluto is from our sun. It is so far away that one orbit around Fomalhaut takes 872 years. The planet's gravity is apparently creating a gap in the disc, shepherding matter out of it. Click here for an article from NASA and the actual picture of Fomalhaut b, the newly discovered planet's tentative designation.
As our capacities improve it seems only a matter of time before we discover another world that supports life, if one exists relatively close to us. Such a planet would be easily identifiable from the spectrograph of an atmosphere that contained a lot of free oxygen and a replenishing quantity of methane. These characteristics would almost certainly be the byproducts of biological activity.
Given the progress of our detection systems and the nearly infinite number of stars and planets it seems increasingly likely that such a world will be found, even within the next few years. It will be interesting to say the least how such a discovery might affect such fields as philosophy, science, art and literature here on our little blue planet.
1 comment:
I must be woefully out of date with my science knowledge. I was still under the impression that Jupiter was about the largest a planet could get before the "planet" would self ignite under its own mass.
The discovery is amazing, especially considering the distances involved. I fully expect that we'll find planets that could contain life much like our own, in our own lifetimes. Whether we'll ever have contact with other forms of life, a lá Close Encounters of a Third Kind, remains to be seen. I've always maintained, however, that to believe that our planet is the only planet in the entire universe having intelligent life is naive and incredibly arrogant.
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