Major Breakthrough: First Photos of Planets Around Other Stars

This 3D representation of the three planets orbiting the star HR 8799 shows the system is located 90 degrees away from the Milky Way galactic center, lower than the sun.

Breakthrough technology

Until now, scientists have inferred the presence of planets mainly by detecting an unseen world's gravitational tug on its host star or waiting for the planet to transit in front of its star and then detecting a dip in the star's light. While these methods have helped to identify more than 300 extrasolar planets to date, astronomers have struggled to actually directly image and see such inferred planets.

The four photographed exoplanets are discussed in two research papers published online today by the journal Science.

"Every extrasolar planet detected so far has been a wobble on a graph. These are the first pictures of an entire system," said Bruce Macintosh, an astrophysicist from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, and part of the team that photographed the multi-planet system in infrared light. "We've been trying to image planets for eight years with no luck and now we have pictures of three planets at once."

Astronomers have claimed previously to have directly imaged a planet, with at least two such objects, though not everybody agreed the objects were planets. Instead, they may be dim, failed stars known as brown dwarfs.