I got a great "Living in the future" kick out of the headline on the New York Times story about Thursday's big astronomical announcement: First Pictures Taken of Extrasolar Planets. The phrasing of the headline conjures images of pictures of clouds swirling on distant gas giants; alas, the reality is a little more mundane:
In scratchy telescope pictures released to the world Thursday in Science Express, the online version of the journal Science, the new planets appear as fuzzy dots that move slightly around their star from exposure to exposure. Astronomers who have seen the new images agreed that these look like the real thing.
Steinn has much more information, along with a more accurate title: direct imaging of extrasolar planets. If you want to know all sorts of background about the images and the stars in question, Steinn's your guy.
The images in question were generated using a coronagraphic technique, which is pretty much the idiot-simple first idea you might have about how to take pictures of extrasolar planets: put something in place to block out the light of the star, and look for faint bright objects near it. I actually remember asking some astronomer about this when I was a kid, and getting some answer that technical enough to be convincing without being informative, saying "It'll never work." I don't know what changed in the interim, but it's cool to be living in the future.
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Likely what's changed is the computing horsepower and image processing algorithms given credit in the article. The last couple of decades have, apparently, seen wondrous improvements in the algorithms, not just Moore's law for the horsepower.
I want my rocket car dammit!
Don't give me that 'living in the future' crap. No jetpacks, no warp drive, no controlled fusion, no future.
Also, no hoverboards. It can't be the future without hoverboards.