Astroboffin discovers exoplanet by accident ... in 1917 A reexamination of astronomical records has shown that an astronomer unknowingly snapped an exoplanet during the First World War – well before such bodies were confirmed in the 1990s. In 1917 Dutch-American astronomer Adriaan van Maanen, working at the Mount Wilson Observatory (then part of Carnegie Observatories), took a …
(2) would be quite an achievement. In our history society, we've managed to convert all our diskettes, VHS tapes and audio cassettes to digital storage. But who can say that the (hardware) means to read the new formats will be around even one decade later? So far, we've achieved a single digital medium (to simplify copying the archive to new media as each becomes obsolete). But it still needs constant oversight to avoid that obsolescence.
Here's an interesting discussion of old astronomical records, and how to preserve them... and their annotations.
The Scientific and Historical Value of Annotations on Astronomical Photographic Plates
Sara J. Schechner, David H. Sliski
http://arxiv.org/abs/1602.03475
The application of photography to astronomy was a critical step in the development of astrophysics at the end of the nineteenth century. Using custom-built photographic telescopes and objective prisms, astronomers took images of the sky on glass plates during a 100-year period from many observing stations around the globe. After each plate was developed, astronomers and their assistants studied and annotated the plates as they made astrometric, photometric and spectroscopic measurements, counted galaxies, observed stellar variability, tracked meteors, and calculated the ephemerides of asteroids and comets. In this paper, the authors assess the importance of the plate annotations for future scientific, historical, and educational programs. Unfortunately, many of these interesting annotations are now being erased when grime is removed from the plates before they are digitized to make the photometric data available for time-domain astrophysics. To see what professional astronomers and historians think about this situation, the authors conducted a survey. This paper captures the lively discussion on the pros and cons of the removal of plate markings, how to best to document them if they must be cleaned off, and what to do with plates whose annotations are deemed too valuable to be erased. Three appendices to the paper offer professional guidance on the best practices for handling and cleaning the plates, photographing any annotations, and rehousing them.
So an exoplanet is a planet orbiting a star?
Presumably then there is an endoplanet which is a planet inside a star?
Else why the qualification?
I naively assumed that most planets orbited stars.
I feel there must be something lacking in the provided definition but I'm just too idle to Google for it.
An endoplanet is not entirely impossible given the stellar evolution of a large star into a red giant, and the physical nature of a red giant. The planet won't be there for very long, though.
ISTR reading that it's the final fate of planet Earth, just before the sun goes bang. Certainly the final fate of Mercury and Venus.
Well, I created an account for this that I probably will never check again, hopefully you do lol
Exoplanet is any planet outside our solar system, so and endoplanet would be like Earth or Jupiter
However that doesnt mean they necessarily orbit a star, some are rogue planets
@Kane; "I think "Dirty Dwarf" sounds better."
Didn't Soft Cell once do a song about that? (Almost certainly NSFW...)
Is it actually a discovery if the astronomer doesn't identify the object in question?
"Precovery" would be more correct in astronomical circles, even though the word sounds weird.
@TheProf , @cray74 ; Yes, I was going to say the same thing as TheProf, but he/she got there first.
I notice that Cray74's linked article mentions the fact that Galileo apparently spotted what we now know is Neptune over 200 years before it was officially discovered, but didn't recognise it as a planet. He, for all his achievements, isn't generally credited as the "disoverer" of the planet.
Still an interesting article, even if I wouldn't credit the original astronomer/photographer for "discovering" the planet itself.
@Tom 7; I don't think anyone here was remotely blaming van Maanen for not drawing conclusions that today's astronomers might, given that the latter are standing on the shoulders of massive advances in astronomical understanding during the past century, rather than working back when Tommys were still fighting Germans in First World War trenches.
The point was simply that he probably shouldn't be credited as the "discoverer"; no more than that.
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