{"id":790910,"date":"2026-10-03T18:08:08","date_gmt":"2026-10-03T18:08:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/790910\/"},"modified":"2026-10-03T18:08:08","modified_gmt":"2026-10-03T18:08:08","slug":"thats-no-moon-thats-an-exoplanet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/790910\/","title":{"rendered":"That\u2019s No Moon\u2026 That\u2019s An Exoplanet!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It wasn\u2019t that long ago that a science teacher would have told students that there was no evidence of planets around other star systems. Even more recently, they might have said that while we\u2019ve seen evidence of extra-solar planets, we would never be able to see them directly. But that\u2019s all changed. [Jason Wang] has <a href=\"https:\/\/jasonwang.space\/orbits.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">several videos<\/a> that use images taken over years to visualize the orbit of several large exoplanets.<\/p>\n<p>Of course, some extrapolation is involved. According to [Jason]:<\/p>\n<p>We unfortunately do not have the luxury of watching these planets every night and record them. However, these planets move slowly, with orbital periods at least decades long, and predictably following Kepler\u2019s laws. We can use a technique called motion interpolation to reconstruct what the image should look like using images taken before and after the date we are interested in. Motion interpolation is a technique commonly found in video editing and in modern TVs.<\/p>\n<p>You have to be a patient photographer, apparently. One video has 30 images taken over 17 years, for example. Another has 10 images from the Keck Observatory taken over 12 years.<\/p>\n<p>The work has fed scientific papers <a href=\"https:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/2210.14213\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">like this one<\/a> or <a href=\"https:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/1607.05272\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">this one<\/a>. While it might be more fun to see these star systems from the bridge of your favorite starship, this is probably as close as you are going to get.<\/p>\n<p>We find both the prospect of <a href=\"https:\/\/hackaday.com\/2024\/02\/29\/nasa-found-another-super-earth-with-tantalizing-possibilities\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">exoplanets<\/a> and the <a href=\"https:\/\/hackaday.com\/2023\/10\/02\/the-path-to-profiling-extraterrestrial-atmospheres-with-astrophotonics\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">technology used to find them<\/a> exciting<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It wasn\u2019t that long ago that a science teacher would have told students that there was no evidence&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":790911,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[59,90,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-790910","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-gb","tag-science","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/790910","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=790910"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/790910\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/790911"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=790910"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=790910"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=790910"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}