November 14, 2008 - Washington Post
Staring at his computer screen in May, poking through images of the bright star Fomalhaut, astronomer Paul Kalas found himself staring at a tiny white dot. The dot appeared amid a great ring of dust circling the star. From one image to the next, the dot moved.
For four days, through the Memorial Day weekend, Kalas ransacked the possibilities before settling on a stunning conclusion: He was looking at a world, a giant planet circling Fomalhaut.
...
Kalas's discovery was one of two announced yesterday that could be breakthroughs in the search for "extrasolar planets," or "exoplanets," those beyond our own solar system. The other, by Canadian astronomer Christian Marois and his colleagues, may be a triumph in triplicate, for the scientists say they have obtained images of three planets -- a scaled-up version of our solar system -- orbiting a distant star called HR 8799.
...
Marois, meanwhile, used two telescopes in Hawaii to study HR 8799, which is 128 light-years away, still in our same galactic Zip code. Marois, an astronomer with the Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics in Victoria, B.C., saw the first possible planet around HR 8799 this past spring. Then, on July 9, while taking the United flight from San Francisco to Hilo, Hawaii, he discovered what looked like a second planet lurking in the data on his laptop computer. That suggested he had found a planetary system and not just a single world.
...