i just got a ring about this earlier, and had to share it with you guys. It has been confirmed that Hubble has taken the first photograph - a visible-light spectrum photograph - of a planet orbiting another star. [source]
The star is Fomalhaut, a white star 25 light years away, about twice the size of the Sun. It is a young star, 200-300 million years old (the Sun is 4.5 billion years old), and it will be a very short-lived star with an estimated lifespan of 1 billion years - but it is one of the brightest stars in the southern sky.
It is surrounded by a huge dust cloud over 120 AU wide, with a big, clear-cut hole in the middle. Because the system is so young, that cloud is probably planetary proto-matter, and the big hole is caused by the planet (which is why they looked there in the first place).
The planet itself is called Fomalhaut b, and is 15-1000 times the mass of Earth, orbiting Fomalhaut in a highly elliptical orbit.
For the curious, the chance of life on Fomalhaut b is almost none, partly because of the youth of the planet, partly because of the dust in the system (which would mean the surface of Fomalhaut b is under constant bombardment) and partly because of the extremely eccentric orbit. Furthermore, the chance of life on other planets - if they exist - is also slim, for similar reasons.
The star is Fomalhaut, a white star 25 light years away, about twice the size of the Sun. It is a young star, 200-300 million years old (the Sun is 4.5 billion years old), and it will be a very short-lived star with an estimated lifespan of 1 billion years - but it is one of the brightest stars in the southern sky.
It is surrounded by a huge dust cloud over 120 AU wide, with a big, clear-cut hole in the middle. Because the system is so young, that cloud is probably planetary proto-matter, and the big hole is caused by the planet (which is why they looked there in the first place).
The planet itself is called Fomalhaut b, and is 15-1000 times the mass of Earth, orbiting Fomalhaut in a highly elliptical orbit.
For the curious, the chance of life on Fomalhaut b is almost none, partly because of the youth of the planet, partly because of the dust in the system (which would mean the surface of Fomalhaut b is under constant bombardment) and partly because of the extremely eccentric orbit. Furthermore, the chance of life on other planets - if they exist - is also slim, for similar reasons.
