November 13, 2008 - ScienceNews
They’ve got the whole world in their hands. Four worlds, actually.
Two teams of extrasolar planet-hunters report that they have achieved a long-sought milestone: obtaining the first undisputed images of planets orbiting stars beyond the solar system.
One team, using the Hubble Space Telescope, has recorded a single planet around the massive star Fomalhaut, which lies just 25 light-years from Earth. The other team, using two large ground-based telescopes, has taken images of three planets orbiting a star — the first portrait of an entire planetary system outside the solar system. Details of both findings appear online November 13 in separate articles in Science.
One of the teams, led by Christian Marois of the Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics in Victoria, Canada, used the Gemini North and Keck 2 telescopes atop Hawaii’s Mauna Kea to image the region around a massive star called HR 8799. Marois was already carrying a tightly held secret when he boarded an airplane in July to Mauna Kea. Images his team had taken with Gemini North nine months earlier had revealed a faint point of light — a possible planet — near HR 8799, which lies about 130 light-years from Earth....