'New solar system' photographed
Updated on 14 November 2008
Scientists have taken the first snapshots of another solar system, ushering in a new era in astronomy.
The infrared images show a family of three giant worlds orbiting a young hot star in the constellation of Pegasus, 130 light years from Earth.
Until now, astronomers have relied on indirect methods to detect "extra-solar" planets, which are normally impossible to see because of the blinding glare of their parent stars.
Using these techniques, planets are described as wiggly lines on a graph or numbers in a data stream.
But the planets described in the journal Science were photographed directly, using high-precision ground-based telescopes and sophisticated computer processing to cancel out the light from the star.
In another development also reported in Science, Hubble Space Telescope astronomers said they had photographed a single Jupiter-sized planet orbiting a close neighbour of the Sun just 25 light years away.
The parent star of the three-planet family is known as HR 8799. It is 1.5 times more massive than the Sun, and five times brighter, but less than 100 million years old. In comparison, the Sun was formed around 4.5 billion years ago.
Two of the planets are thought to be around 10 times heavier than Jupiter, and the third is about seven times more massive. In size, they could have diameters 20% to 30% larger than Jupiter's.
The planets are very young, only about 60 million years old, and still glow with the heat generated by their formation from contracting lumps of dusty debris.
Like the giant planets orbiting the Sun, they lie in the outer regions of their solar system, roughly 25, 40 and 70 astronomical units (AU) from their star. An astronomical unit is the distance between the Earth and the Sun, about 93 million miles.
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