Exoplanets

[poider (Peter)]

G'day, I don't know if this is the right place to ask, so I will cross my fingers and hold my breath...
Have astronomers taken any optical photos of any of the planets outside of our solar system, and if so is there a list or a website with any of these documented?
Peter

[Stonius (Markus)]

Originally Posted by poider

G'day, I don't know if this is the right place to ask, so I will cross my fingers and hold my breath...
Have astronomers taken any optical photos of any of the planets outside of our solar system, and if so is there a list or a website with any of these documented?
Peter

They have, though they are still just pixel blips. If you go to the wikipedia page of directly observed exoplanets, you'll find images like this one

But for actual surface features, the best we've been able to do so far is to image Betelgeuse, which is gigantic, even for a star, but it's big enough you can see some surface features on it. Still blows me away to this day that we can do this.

Markus

[markbakovic]

google "direct imaging exoplanet", one of the results: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...ged_exoplanets might be helpful.

There's also a presentation on SEEDS, the exoplanet survey done with Subaru's coronagraph, here: http://www.astro.uni-jena.de/~theory...ks/kandori.pdf which contains some names and images (as well as the relevant discovery paper references), but drilling down through wikipedia's "exoplanet" entries until you get the list of surveys is probably your best bet.

Of course if by "optical" you mean "visible", you'll be disappointed, as nIR reradiation is by far the best signal so far for exoplanets (at least known ones, which are predominantly orbiting stars with "considerably" less IR in their emissions (proportionally) -> easier to pick out). It looks like ZIMPOL on one of the VLT units operates at visible wavelengths but is polarimetry really "direct" imaging? I'd need to read (a lot) more to decide...

[edit] i type slow... [/edit]

[poider (Peter)]

Thank you.