The moment we have our first, direct-observation photo of an earth-like exoplanet will be a defining point in our history.
I think the transit time is likely decades and the build time is also a long time as well. But in maybe 40-100 years we could have plentiful HD images of 'nearby' exoplanets. If I'm still around when it happens I will be beyond hyped.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nancy_Grace_Roman_Space_Telesc...
> In April 2025, the second Trump administration proposed to cut funding for Roman again as part of its FY2026 budget draft. This was part of wider proposed cuts to NASA's science budget, down to US$3.9 billion from its FY2025 budget of US$7.5 billion. On April 25, 2025, the White House Office of Management and Budget announced a plan to cancel dozens of space missions, including the Roman Space Telescope, as part of the cuts.
I mean, even if there is life it's like 1 in a gazillion. But you could imagine some ML looking through all of its images to find planets, etc.
I understand the difficulty in what they are doing, but the scale of the error here is amusing. “We thing we took a picture of something, but it might have been billions of things much bigger but further away”
Though at a 50 AU orbit around a smallish star, that might take a while.
Orbital mechanics, orbital period, and minimum determinable arc of JWST.
Though another thought is that doppler might also reveal velocity, if a spectrum could be obtained. Since the system is nearly perpendicular to the Solar System (we're viewing it face-on rather than from the side), those shifts will be small.
What an appropriate name for an astrophysicist. I wonder if she's distantly related to the namesake of the Lagrange point. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrange_point
Incidentally, although I'd never heard of A-M Lagrange before now, she's had an incredible career: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne-Marie_Lagrange
Scopus has 390 profiles of people named Lagrange. It is not a very popular family name but it is not uncommon either and some of them are bound to end up in academia, whether they are descendants of Joseph-Louis or not.
/s
At 110 light-years distance you would need a telescope ~450 kilometers across to image this planet at 100x100 pixel resolution--about the size of a small icon. That is a physical limit based on the wavelength of light.
The best we could do is build a space-based optical interferometer with two nodes 450 kilometers apart, but synchronized to 1 wavelength. That's a really tough engineering challenge.
Also, could the image be created by “scanning” a big area and then composing the image from a bunch of smaller ones?
If you only wanted 10x10 resolution you could get by with a 1.8 kilometer telescope.
Wikipedia has more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angular_resolution. The Rayleigh criterion is the equation to calculate this.
My (tenuous) understanding of interferometry is that you receive light from two points separated by a baseline and then combine that light in such a way that the wavelengths match up and reinforce at appropriate points.
Wikipedia has a decent summary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aperture_synthesis
Not that the Milky Way is a small place, but even most sci-fi featuring FTL and all sorts of handwaves has to content itself with shenanigans confined to a single galaxy due to the mindblowing, and accelerating, gaps between galaxies.
That the stars are beyond reach might be depressing, how aggresively we are gambling our little boat is on the other hand actively scary and perhaps the dominant limit on humanity's effective reach.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_gravitational_lens
2. https://www.nasa.gov/general/direct-multipixel-imaging-and-s...
Of all the possible space probes or missions we could do. I want this one more than any of them!
Parker could make it there in a century, but it doesn't have to slow down and stop.
A hypothetical planet beyond Pluto be in a huge part of the sky: Presumably the orbit of such a planet could be inclined about as much as Pluto's. The 17-degree inclination of Pluto's orbit means it could be in a 34-degree wide strip of the sky, which, if I'm doing my math right, is about 29% of the full sky. If we allow for up to a 30 degree inclination, then that's half the sky.
There's also the matter of object size and brightness. The proposed Planet Nine[1] was supposed to be a few hundred AU away, and around the mass of 4 or 5 Earths. The object discovered in this paper is around 100 M🜨, at around 52 AU from its star. Closer and larger. (Of course, there's a sweet spot for exoplanet discovery, where you want the planet to be close enough to be bright, but far enough away to be outside the glare of the star.)
In contrast, current techniques are biased towards close-in planets. Both Doppler-shift and light-curve methods tend to detect close-in planets.
We’ll get a better idea of the distribution of planets with both techniques.
ge96•5h ago
edit: but it's the orange thing not the star