A Moving Image of Exoplanets Orbiting an Alien Star #SpaceSaturday

Imagine a zoetrope. That’s one of those wide cylinders with vertical holes. If you look through the holes you’ll see a sequence of images around the interior of the cylinder, horses being the iconic example. When you spin the cylinder and look through the slit, the horse appears to be galloping. Film and stop-motion animation are successors of the zoetrope, and use similar methods to manipulate human vision into seeing movement where there are only static images.

Now imagine that instead of a sequence of horse images, you’re seeing a sequence of photos taken with a telescope of a star and its orbiting exoplanets, 38 million miles away. And imagine that the phots were taken over an 12 year period. And now imagine that what it produces is, in effect, the world’s first motion picture of planets orbiting an aliens star. Here’s more from Science Alert:

An updated time-lapse of the previous 7-year time lapse! HR 8799 harbors four super-Jupiters orbiting with periods that range from decades to centuries. We have been monitoring this system using the Keck Observatory on Maunakea. This movie was made using real images taken from the telescope. Motion interpolation was used on 10 images of HR 8799 taken from over 12 years to create this movie.

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• Source: https://blog.adafruit.com/2023/02/11/a-moving-image-of-exoplanets-orbiting-an-alien-star-spacesaturday/