Thursday 12

Fuzzy




"I've been doing this for eight years and after eight years we get there at once," - Macintosh

The first photographs have been taken of planets outside our solar system. Two astronomers were sent to photography these four planets that resemble a tiny speck of white. These planets are trillions Earth seems to have its first fuzzy photos of alien planets outside our solar system, images captured by two teams of astronomers. The pictures show four likely planets that appear as tiny little specs of white. These "giant gaseous" planets are hardly like Earth and are remotely habitable. Bruce Macintosh of the Lawrence Livermore National Lab led one of the two teams of photographers. He says, "It is a step on that road to understand if there are other planets like Earth and potentially life out there." His team decided to use two ground based telescopes and the second team chose to rely on photos from the 18 year old Hubble Space Telescope to create pictures of the " exoplanets" which are planets that don't orbit our sun. The research was published In the Thursday's edition of the Journal Science. These photos are important says Ed Weiler, NASA's space sciences chief. He compared it to a hunt for elusive elephants: "For years we've been hearing the elephants, finding the tracks, seeing the trees knocked down by them, but we've never been able to snap a picture. Now we have a picture." The picture above looks fuzzy because the star is 100 million times brighter than its planet.

The pictures taken of these four planets resemble the work I've been producing this semester. Macro photography is becoming used in other fields and photographs are becoming such a useful tool. The colors in these images are beautiful and the photographers were really able to document these planets well.

Borenstein, Seth. " First Fuzzy Photos of Planets Outside our Solar System." Yahoo News. 13 Nov 2008..

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