This incredible image was taken from 12,000 light years away from an observatory on Mauna Kea, Hawaii. Zoom in for best view of this amazing sight! The star is expanding and reached the orbit of a Jupiter sized planet, and this is what it looks like. It looks like the planet is surfing the sun. Sun surfing! I presume any intelligent life forms have left the planet long ago. They discovered the event due to the fact that the star was suddenly 100 times brighter than normal. In a first, astronomers witnessed a star swallowing a Jupiter-sized planet. The Earth could be next
Sure it is. Last I heard we were detecting planets by the variations in star intensities and spectrum analysis. All of a sudden we have high resolution detailed images of extrasolar planets. OK, so we have directly imaged some planets, and this is what they look like. From Wikipedia, List of directly imaged exoplanets First star is a brown dwarf and the red planet is a gas giant 5 times larger than Jupiter. Image was taken in infrared and colorized.
I can just imagine our dopey government, thinking, that will solve our financial problems and kill covid at the same time.
From keckobservatory.org Keck Observatory’s New Planet Imager Delivers First Science – W. M. Keck Observatory MAUNAKEA, HAWAI’I – A new device on the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii has delivered its first images, showing a ring of planet-forming dust around a star and, separately, a cool star-like body, called a brown dwarf, lying near to its companion star. The device, called the vortex coronagraph, was recently installed inside the Near Infrared Camera 2 (NIRC2), the workhorse infrared imaging camera at Keck. The vortex coronagraph has the potential to image planetary systems and brown dwarfs closer to their host stars than was possible previously. This is what a real interpolated infrared coronagraph image looks like from this observatory from 2017. The light from the main star is blocked out in this process to image orbiting bodies. In this case the bright spot is a brown dwarf.