Paleontologists do this a lot: They look in dusty museum cabinets and drawers and find species that went unnoticed by naturalists of old. Now astronomers are doing their version: Re-analyzing old Hubble Space Telescope images to look for planets outside our solar system, so-called exoplanets. The trick is new software that “cleans up” old images, removing star-glare, flare and other digital noise.
So far, few mainstream publications have picked this up. It’s a process-of-science story of the kind that doesn’t wow non-science editors. Alan Boyle, MSNBC‘s crack cosmology writer, reports that so-far the new methods have simply been proven by finding exoplanets that were known from other studies. Having worked well, the new software is soon to be applied to other Hubble images to find unknown exoplanets.
The catalog of exoplanets, already approaching 500 entries, is likely to boom.
Ian O’Neill has a detailed look at the process of this science at DiscoveryNews.com.
-Boyce Rensberger
Leave a Reply