The Greatest Digital Photo Ever?
The world is awash in photos but few, I'd argue, are as impressive as the one pictured above.
Granted, it doesn't look like much at first blush but bear with me. The tiny white speck you see is Beta Pictoris b, a planet some 63 light-years away from Earth (that's 3.70345488 × 1014 miles for those calculating at home). It is being hailed as the "best ever" direct photo of a planet outside of our solar system (the giant mass next to it is a star). It was snapped during a 60-second exposure with the Gemini Planet Imager, a camera 10 years in the making that should bring distant planets to light for the first time.
The imaginer is part of the Gemini South Telescope in Chile and represents a significant advance in the quality of images we're able to gather from space. According to Stanford University, previous cameras were only capable of observing planets that were huge (three to 10 times Jupiter's mass) and far from their stars (about as far as Neptune is from our sun). The Gemini Planet Imager, on the other hand, can detect Jupiter-sized planets orbiting closer to fainter stars. It won't be able to detect Earth-sized planets, however, since those are too small and don't reflect enough light.
Still, the GPI will be able to give us a read on Beta Pictoris b's temperature and chemical composition which in turn will give Earth-bound scientists more data for their computer models.
It also moves us closer to the day when we'll be able to directly photograph Earth-sized planets trillions of miles away and further peel back the layers of mystery in the skies above us.
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