November 13, 2008 - Newsweek
While all of us who are rooting for the existence of little green men have been cheered by each discovery of a planet orbiting a star other than our sun—an “exoplanet,” of which there were 322 when I checked the catalog a minute ago—there’s always been a tinge of disappointment. Every validated discovery, starting with the first in 1995, has been indirect. In other words, astronomers didn't actually see the planet beyond our solar system, but instead inferred its existence by, for instance, noticing something funny about how a star moves and realizing, gee, that funny movement must be due to a planet tugging gravitationally on the star. But this afternoon, two separate teams of astronomers, using three different telescopes, are announcing the discovery of exoplanets by, well, looking.
One team, led by Paul Kalas of the University of California, Berkeley, used the Hubble Space Telescope to image a planet they call Fomalhaut b, orbiting the star Fomalhaut, 25 light years away in the constellation Piscis Australis (the Southern Fish). The other team, anchored by Christian Marois of the Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics in Victoria, British Columbia, imaged three planets orbiting a star called HR 8799, 128 light years from Earth, using the Keck and Gemini telescopes. Both are being published this afternoon online by the journal Science, at its Science Express website.
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