BEHOLD

>why do they dim and brighten again
Hundreds of images taken over 6 years. It could by anything from minute differences in focus and exposure, to differences in that star's solar cycles.
The pulsing lights around the blacked-out star are likely the sun's corona across 6 years as it ebbs and flares, or slight glare caused by the black-out disc being placed ever-so-slightly off-center in successive images.

Also, judging by the 20au scale indicator, it looks like the little yellow star they use to indicate the star's location is also coincidentally about the same size as the Earth-Sun orbit would be, or possibly closer to the Earth-Mars orbit. A little rocky planet could be right in that tiny area there, whipping around the star six times in the span of that gif.

I just found that cool.

>imaging

Imagining.

What's the sauce nigger?

the actual astonomers who's name were on the gif posted them somewhere on reddit. Talked about their work.
>inb4 go back

How big is this star compared to our sun?

Those orbits seem to be incredibly slow, but this is still fascinating. The distance is 20 AU, from what I remember in basic astronomy, AU is the distance from Earth to the Sun, right? So these planets are much further out, similar to our gas giants then, correct?

Still, this shit is fucking fascinating. I can't believe we live in the day and age where we can literally image other planets in other solar systems with instrumentation.

It would be cool if the variations in brightness were due to moons orbiting the planets.

that first photos were in 2009, but the bulk started in 2012 i think.
user, they are "barely" able to pick up the glare of a jupiter/saturn sized planet from out of the corona/glare of the overall star. If you look on the wiki the unassistsed photos look just like a star, they had to use advanced imaging techniques to even tell there were planets there just a few years ago... and luckily they assumed they'd be able to bring them out in the wash. They started taking the pictures before they could see a planet in the pictures.

orbital periods are 45, 100, 190, and 460 years. Thus having a decade or so just to take pictures wouldn't be enough to show a full rotation for a single one of them.

That's insane, how we can know so much about these star systems from such little information and just a few years studying them.

Can't they measure the composition of the planets too by studying the light and looking at absorption / emission spectrums?

>This is kind of a major deal
No shit Sherlock, since it is the first stellar system to be imaged outside Earth's solar system.
Those four planets appear to be hot super-Jovians, which is fckn awesome if you think about it.

No, there are dozens now. And no, these planets are far from their star.

you can measure their periods with this gif and middle school math...

ok this is all cool and dandy but
WHERE ARE THE AYYY LMAOS

Wouldn't super-Jovians practically be Brown Dwarfs, and thus relatively hot from their own internal pressure? If Jupiter were just 10% bigger, it would be a brown dwarf as well.

>Ayyliums might be looking at us the same way RIGHT NOW

I suppose if there was something super out of the ordinary we'd have detected that before this - like a dyson sphere.
you'd need 13 more Jupiters to get a brown dwarf with sustaining fusion. Heres an entire article speculating on the different star sizes and jupiter.
phys.org/news/2014-02-jupiter-star.html
I think it's just us user

They are just guessing 100%, you can be super specific in your fantasies when noone can actually go there to contradict you

It's like when geologists talk about the composition of the earth, and every time they drill down they realize they are all wrong

what did he mean by this?

youtu.be/UfJ-i4Y6DGU
you can tell what's in the atmosphere from the light it reflects to your telescope.

>This image is from the KECK observatory

It's actually from Gemini South.

A "hot Jupiter" is a planet with similar mass to Jupiter that is very close to the host star. It's hot because it's close in, not because it makes it's own heat.

No they're not guessing. People have developed Bayesian methods for estimating the atmospheric composition so they never say more than what the data says.

>dozens
>plural
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_directly_imaged_exoplanets
>22 directly imaged
That would make your claim of the plural dozens technically incorrect. The best kind of incorrect.