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).
Reason077 17 hours ago [-]
How come both videos only go up to 2022 or so? Did we stop watching this star? Or is there just a delay on releasing the data?
wthomp 47 minutes ago [-]
I think there’s a couple new images. I’ll upload an updated one some time.
cloudbonsai 20 hours ago [-]
I’m curious what that blight red smoke flickering around the star is. Some kind of interplanatory gas?
rozab 19 hours ago [-]
I think it might just be diffraction artifacts animated by the interpolation (I hereby invoke cunnignhams law)
wthomp 19 hours ago [-]
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.
19 hours ago [-]
jakzurr 17 hours ago [-]
omg both animations are gorgeous; those far out orbits sure take a long time to complete
alexpotato 6 hours ago [-]
For those that don't know, the Drake equation [0] included a term for "percentage of stars with at least one orbiting planet".
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]
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.
kreelman 17 hours ago [-]
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 :-)
ortusdux 21 hours ago [-]
I'm excited for the leap in this tech that the Nancy Grace Roman telescope's new chronograph promises.
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.
izend 21 hours ago [-]
I am as well and hopefully Starship allows even larger telescopes!
lukeify 20 hours ago [-]
Starship can do it.
As long as the telescope can fit through the Starlink Pez dispenser.
alexpotato 6 hours ago [-]
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.
grvbck 4 hours ago [-]
> B. You could have multiple panels operate as a swarm.
Is that level of precision even remotely achievable with today's technology?
My understanding is that orbital insertion accuracy is in the ±10-50 meters range, with the most advanced formation flying satellite swarms hitting 10 cm to 1 m precision between satellites with the help of optical navigation.
But the precision between the panels on a telescope like JWST is in the sub-mm range, no?
Also, I'd assume stuff like orbital decay, atmospheric drag, gravitational perturbations, and solar radiation pressure would make it difficult to maintain precision over time.
I'm sure/hopeful there's some people here at HN working on stuff like this, please fill in and correct me!
walrus01 19 hours ago [-]
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.
dylan604 18 hours ago [-]
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.
NitpickLawyer 14 hours ago [-]
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.
walrus01 17 hours ago [-]
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.
topspin 14 hours ago [-]
> If this remains a long term design limitation
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.
turtletontine 23 hours ago [-]
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.
dekhn 19 hours ago [-]
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.
ccozan 21 hours ago [-]
Can you explain the past tense "there was" ? Is there a reason for a black hole to dissapear?
adrianN 18 hours ago [-]
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.
kristianc 8 hours ago [-]
It’s probably still there, but it’s 26,000 light years away, so the light we’re seeing today left Sag A in the Paleaolithic era.
teamonkey 21 hours ago [-]
The black hole still exists (probably), the hypothesis that it existed was proven in the past.
swiftcoder 23 hours ago [-]
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
Imagine living on a planet circling a star circling a black hole. This thing in the sky just growing bigger and smaller in your sky on a 12 year, or longer, cycle.
I wonder what Sag A* would look like in the night sky.
dylan604 18 hours ago [-]
> 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*.
hliyan 11 hours ago [-]
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
7373737373 22 hours ago [-]
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
kridsdale3 22 hours ago [-]
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.
Quinner 21 hours ago [-]
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.
arlattimore 21 hours ago [-]
Good call!
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.
meindnoch 9 hours ago [-]
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.
holoduke 9 hours ago [-]
It's harder to comprehend smallness. The journey to planc constant is longer than the size of our observable universe.
317070 1 days ago [-]
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.
turtletontine 23 hours ago [-]
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.
jcims 24 hours ago [-]
TL;DR - Two inside (16, 26AU) and two outside (43, 69AU) Pluto's orbit (39AU). They are all estimated to be a bit bigger than Jupiter.
Kaxo 23 hours ago [-]
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?
wthomp 59 minutes ago [-]
In 2017 we captured five nights worth of images and averaged them. Some early years only had one night.
Around 2019 we also figured out some better observing strategies— all the later data is taken without a coronagraph. Turns out the coronagraph was hurting more than it helped, close in. Not to say coronagraphs aren’t useful, but some aspects of the observatory control software aren’t in place to get the benefits out of the coronagraph.
rietta 23 hours ago [-]
I do not know, but my best guess would be an improved post processing algorithm was introduced.
teekert 21 hours ago [-]
Wouldn't you just post-process all images again at that point?
ajcp 23 hours ago [-]
I believe it's because the star's brightness does fluctuate, so activity cycle based?
wthomp 58 minutes ago [-]
Not stellar activity — a flare wouldn’t be visible on this scale of image.
The main concerns are the observatory —- how aligned all the many dozens of optics are — and the earths atmosphere on the nights the target was observed.
whiterook6 18 hours ago [-]
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?
wthomp 56 minutes ago [-]
The main reason, is why bother? We know there’s four planets, we know they orbit according to Keplers laws, we know how bright they are. The public outreach is reasonably well handled by this motion smoothed video. Better to use that telescope time to look for new planets instead!
wthomp 49 minutes ago [-]
That said yes there is something about earths orbit. There’s a few month window that gives the best observation of this star. We time the observations to be roughly June- November most years.
adrianN 18 hours ago [-]
Telescope time is precious.
kadoban 16 hours ago [-]
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.
wthomp 57 minutes ago [-]
Yeah each photo is one - five nights of work full time from 3-5 people.
topspin 13 hours ago [-]
> but, uh--why only 10 or so photos?
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.
trilogic 10 hours ago [-]
Interesting to see 12 years in 12 seconds, time is relatíve
Juvination 22 hours ago [-]
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.
wthomp 54 minutes ago [-]
They probably have moons.
But I doubt they’re outshining other planets — other planets on the same orbit would be unstable, and most likely be ejected from the system very quickly. The system is about fifty million years old, so a good guess is that the orbits have been stable for about fifty million years.
Sarkie 23 hours ago [-]
They need to remove that one frame
desireco42 21 hours ago [-]
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.
sixothree 23 hours ago [-]
When my mother was born, plate tectonics was a hypothesis. When I was born we didn't know for certain if planets existed outside of our solar system.
ButlerianJihad 53 minutes ago [-]
My mother's high school graduation present was a fully illustrated, complete set of the World Book Encyclopedia. It played second fiddle and competitor to Encyclopedia Britannica. Many families would purchase these as a limited subscription, where one volume would be delivered per month, until they collected the entire A-Z set.
Mom's encyclopedia contained some amazing anachronisms, by the time I started reading the books in the 1980s. The most interesting one to me was the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi. It included black-and-white photographs of natives in grass skirts and the ocean surf.
Imagine an app that could go back into Wikipedia's article revision history and present them, as they were, 25+ years ago. That's actually sort of impossible for technical reasons.
forinti 23 hours ago [-]
When my grandparents were born, we didn't know there were other galaxies.
desireco42 17 hours ago [-]
So all we have to do is send telescope right up and let it record...
mmooss 23 hours ago [-]
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.
wthomp 52 minutes ago [-]
Good spot! It’s an error in the primary mirror segment phasing.
The observatory has to phase the mirror segments periodically, and it’s a bit of an art as well as a science. For a while, something was happening with their algorithm and procedure that was leaving those spots. Some of us (hi) did complain and it was fixed for the most part. It did come back a couple times though….
The slightly incorrect phasing produces those spots. It’s conceptually like a diffraction spike.
hatthew 21 hours ago [-]
It looks like they're only present for one real frame (of the original 10), so very possible that it's just noise in that frame.
mmooss 18 hours ago [-]
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.
wthomp 50 minutes ago [-]
As responded above, they were persistent diffraction errors in the primary mirror phasing. Think of it like those diffraction spikes from Hubble.
Indeed the video is almost entirely “fabricated” by motion smoothing and interpolation between images taken a year or two apart.
hatthew 18 hours ago [-]
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.
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.
Is that level of precision even remotely achievable with today's technology?
My understanding is that orbital insertion accuracy is in the ±10-50 meters range, with the most advanced formation flying satellite swarms hitting 10 cm to 1 m precision between satellites with the help of optical navigation.
But the precision between the panels on a telescope like JWST is in the sub-mm range, no?
Also, I'd assume stuff like orbital decay, atmospheric drag, gravitational perturbations, and solar radiation pressure would make it difficult to maintain precision over time.
I'm sure/hopeful there's some people here at HN working on stuff like this, please fill in and correct me!
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/
Imagine living on a planet circling a star circling a black hole. This thing in the sky just growing bigger and smaller in your sky on a 12 year, or longer, cycle.
I wonder what Sag A* would look like in the night sky.
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.
Around 2019 we also figured out some better observing strategies— all the later data is taken without a coronagraph. Turns out the coronagraph was hurting more than it helped, close in. Not to say coronagraphs aren’t useful, but some aspects of the observatory control software aren’t in place to get the benefits out of the coronagraph.
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.
But I doubt they’re outshining other planets — other planets on the same orbit would be unstable, and most likely be ejected from the system very quickly. The system is about fifty million years old, so a good guess is that the orbits have been stable for about fifty million years.
Mom's encyclopedia contained some amazing anachronisms, by the time I started reading the books in the 1980s. The most interesting one to me was the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi. It included black-and-white photographs of natives in grass skirts and the ocean surf.
Imagine an app that could go back into Wikipedia's article revision history and present them, as they were, 25+ years ago. That's actually sort of impossible for technical reasons.
Their balanced position and simultaneous changes make them seem like an artifact of the imaging.
The observatory has to phase the mirror segments periodically, and it’s a bit of an art as well as a science. For a while, something was happening with their algorithm and procedure that was leaving those spots. Some of us (hi) did complain and it was fixed for the most part. It did come back a couple times though….
The slightly incorrect phasing produces those spots. It’s conceptually like a diffraction spike.
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.
Indeed the video is almost entirely “fabricated” by motion smoothing and interpolation between images taken a year or two apart.