An exoplanet hidden in the Hubble Space Telescope's archival images has been revealed by data miners using a new technique for spotting the satellites of distant stars.

In search of more information about a known exoplanet orbiting the star HR8799 about 130 light-years from Earth, astronomers turned to the catalog of images Hubble has been amassing for more than 15 years. Using an algorithm that can block the bright light of observed stars allowing the much fainter exoplanets circling them to be seen, the team spotted the planet in an image from 1998.

The same technique could be used on 200 similar datasets from Hubble, as well an unknown number of archival images from ground-based telescopes.

"Now that we've shown that it works, we can use it on a whole set of observations from the archive to see if a planet is hidden in the images," said astronomer David Lafreniere of the University of Toronto, a member of the team that made the find.



The Hubble data archive is a paragon of scientific efficiency. Its easily accessible and very search-friendly information architecture allows scientists to wring more discoveries out of the money we invest in the milestone space telescope. The Hubble data has been used more than six times over, estimates Peter

Fox, a computer scientist at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Other scientific experiments and tools have generated mountains of information, but much of that data is stuffed away in hard copy formats or on hard-to-access databases. Most of that data actually goes unanalyzed.

"The numbers that are typically quoted are three to ten percent of [scientific] data is analyzed," Fox told Wired.com in January. "That means almost none of it is reanalyzed. Is that a good investment in public funds? Probably not."

Lafreniere noted that his team's work was aided by the Hubble archive's metadata and searchability.

"You can search using different parameters, different target names, different wavelengths. The search is easy," he said. "But maybe more importantly, the data is high quality... It's been processed and calibrated such that the result is a high quality product.

With the technique verified, Lafreniere said that it would be applied to future data, too.

"I should add here that for the upcoming James Webb Telescope, this will definitely be one of the strategies used to look for planets," he said. "We need a method to subtract the light of the star."

The James Webb is slated to be launched in 2013. The Kepler Space Telescope, which is designed to look for exoplanets, successfully launched into orbit in March.

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Illustration: NASA, ESA, and Z. Levay (STScI). Photo: NASA, ESA, and D. Lafrenière (University of Toronto, Canada)

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