Skip to main content

Space sausage

A couple of news from the space (this time without any concerning JWST):

A French scientist posted an image he claimed was of an exoplanet. The joke got out of hand when some people took it for real without realizing the scientist posted a photo of a slice of chorizo claiming it to be a planet as a joke.

Meanwhile ESO's VLT (that's Very Large Telescope... I think the guys making these telescopes lack some imagination...) has captured an image of not only one, but two actual exoplanets orbiting a sun-like star.

Direct images of exoplanets are still quite rare and capturing two orbiting the same star is indeed quite the feat. The capture did require some special arrangements e.g. blocking the light from the brighter stars in the background and taking multiple images from the area to tell the planets apart from the fainter stars in the background.

Even with all the image processing the planets weren't much more than a bright spots in the image. The image of the chorizo had a much more to look at 😂