I suspect it's a measurement and not a photo. Something they could put on a chart but that's about it.
There's interesting ideas for imaging exo-planets that involve a fleet of satellites past pluto that use the gravity lens of the sun as their lens. A system like that could get an image of an exo-planet.
"Article I wrote but copied from somewhere else and left out most of the important information, images, video, etc.. and didn't link to the canonical source and then jumped to some conclusions or put a spin on it" is like a bread and butter staple of web journalism. Always frustrating, and so many publications have actively switched to making almost all their stories fit into that model.
Whenever these articles come up that talk about sister earths the only thing I’m really interested in is how far away it is, so here you go:
> Researchers have been excited to use the new telescope to explore it and its six siblings, which are all roughly the size of Earth and which orbit a star 12 parsecs (39 light years) from Earth.
I guess if you could get a probe up to 0.1c (project orion), that's only 390 + 39 years to get direct images from within the solar system. But in 390 + 39 years, I assume imaging from our own solar system will have gotten significantly better making direct imaging possibly unnecessary.
In case I'm not the only one a tad confused about this (awkward) sentence:
> JWST looked at TRAPPIST-1 in mid-infrared wavelengths of light — 20 times redder than the human eye can see
What's referred to here, in terms of wavelengths, is the range 4.9 to 27.9 μm according to https://jwst-docs.stsci.edu/jwst-mid-infrared-instrument. The longest human eyes can see is around 0.75 μm, so I guess that's where the notion of "20 times redder" comes from
Thank you. It was an extremely confusing statement.
I would have gone with something like "a wavelength about 7 to 40 times longer than the longest wavelength human eyes can perceive", or "longer wavelengths than a night vision scope picks up, but shorter than most thermal imagers capture or microwave ovens emit". But really, it might make more sense to have just omitted everything after "mid-infrared wavelengths of light". Kind of like the unnecessary use earlier in the article of both parsecs and light-years. Just go with light-years IMO.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 52.4 ms ] threadThere's interesting ideas for imaging exo-planets that involve a fleet of satellites past pluto that use the gravity lens of the sun as their lens. A system like that could get an image of an exo-planet.
> Researchers have been excited to use the new telescope to explore it and its six siblings, which are all roughly the size of Earth and which orbit a star 12 parsecs (39 light years) from Earth.
I think I'd just start with Alpha Centauri- 40+4 years for a return of direct images of a planet orbiting in a trinary star system.
https://www.space.com/laser-sail-centering-breakthrough-star...
> JWST looked at TRAPPIST-1 in mid-infrared wavelengths of light — 20 times redder than the human eye can see
What's referred to here, in terms of wavelengths, is the range 4.9 to 27.9 μm according to https://jwst-docs.stsci.edu/jwst-mid-infrared-instrument. The longest human eyes can see is around 0.75 μm, so I guess that's where the notion of "20 times redder" comes from
I would have gone with something like "a wavelength about 7 to 40 times longer than the longest wavelength human eyes can perceive", or "longer wavelengths than a night vision scope picks up, but shorter than most thermal imagers capture or microwave ovens emit". But really, it might make more sense to have just omitted everything after "mid-infrared wavelengths of light". Kind of like the unnecessary use earlier in the article of both parsecs and light-years. Just go with light-years IMO.