Scientists take first photos of planets orbiting stars

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 UC 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, located 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 -- 700 trillion miles -- away. Benjamin Zuckerman, an astronomer at UCLA and a member of the Keck-Gemini team, noted that it's only been about a decade since the first exoplanet -- a planet orbiting another star -- was found. He said he never envisioned being able to take a picture of a planet orbiting another star so soon.

Both discoveries were released Thursday by the journal Science.

"These two papers will represent a milestone in the field that people will look back on years from now," he said.

Finding other Earths has been a dream of scientists and authors for centuries. The big problem for all planet hunters is that stars other than our sun are far away, so far that their light overwhelms the weak reflected light of any planets, just as a lightbulb overwhelms the light from a candle.

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.

The two teams used different techniques to solve the problem. Berkeley's Kalas relied on Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys to tease out the Jupiter-sized planet Fomalhaut b. The planet's existence had been suspected since 2005, when Kalas studied a picture of a dust ring around the star.

He noticed the inner edge of the ring was sharply defined, raising his suspicions that there was something hiding in there that had a lot of gravity, like a planet. Planets tend to sweep their orbits clean, either by ejecting pretenders or smashing them to dust.