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Planet Pictured 25 Light-Years Away From Earth

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Los Angeles Times

Published: November 14, 2008

Marking a milestone in the search for Earth-like planets elsewhere in the universe, two teams of astronomers have parted the curtains of space to take the first pictures in history of planets orbiting stars other than our sun.

"This is amazing," said Eugene Chiang, an astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley. "It's almost science fiction. I didn't think this day would occur until years from now."

The first team, led by Berkeley researchers, used the Hubble Space Telescope to take a picture of a giant planet orbiting the star Fomalhaut, 25 light-years from Earth.

Paul Kalas, the lead astronomer for the Berkeley team, said he "nearly had a heart attack" when he found the new planet, which he calls Fomalhaut b.

"It's a profound and overwhelming experience to lay eyes on a planet never before seen," he said.

The other effort relied on the giant Keck and Gemini telescopes in Hawaii to image three planets surrounding the young star HR8799 - 130 light-years, or 700 trillion miles - away. Benjamin Zuckerman, an astronomer at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a member of the Keck-Gemini team, noted that it had been only about a decade since the first exoplanet, a planet orbiting another star, was found.

Both discoveries were reported Thursday by the journal Science.

So far, more than 200 exoplanets have been discovered, but all of the previous ones were found indirectly, mostly from the wobble their gravity causes in their parent stars.

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