Astronomers today announced they had found planets orbiting a distant star, which is not visible at the center of the dust ring in this photo. Via The New York Times:
In what might amount to an early Christmas present to the universe, two groups of astronomers have taken the first pictures of what they say — and other astronomers agree — are probably planets going around other stars.
The achievement, the result of years of effort on improved observational techniques and better data analysis, presages more such discoveries, the experts said, and will open the door to new investigations and discoveries of what planets are and how they came to be formed.
“It’s the tip of iceberg. Now that we know they are there, there is going to be an explosion,” said Christian Marois of the Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics in Victoria, British Columbia. Dr. Marois is the leader of a team that recorded three planets circling a star — known as HR 8799 — 130 light-years away in the constellation Pegasus.
The other team, led by Paul Kalas of the University of California, Berkeley, found a planet orbiting the star Fomalhaut, only 25 light-years from Earth, in the constellation Piscis Austrinus. In an interview by e-mail, Dr. Kalas said that when he finally confirmed his discovery last May, “I nearly had a heart attack.”
In scratchy telescope pictures released to the world Thursday in Science Express, the online version of the journal Science, the new planets appear as fuzzy dots that move slightly around their star from exposure to exposure. Astronomers who have seen the new images agreed that these look like the real thing.
“I think Kepler himself would recognize these as planets orbiting a star following his laws of orbital motion,” Mark S. Marley, of NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif., wrote in an e-mail message elaborating on HR 8799.
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