Scientists take first photos of planets orbiting stars

The first team, led by UC Berkeley researchers, used the Hubble Space Telescope to take a picture of a giant planet orbiting the star Fomalhaut, 25 light-years away.

"It's almost science fiction," said Berkeley astronomer Eugene Chiang. "I didn't think this day would occur until years from now."

Paul Kalas, the lead astronomer for the Berkeley team, said he "nearly had a heart attack" when he found the new planet, tentatively named Fomalhaut b. "It's a profound and overwhelming experience to lay eyes on a planet never before seen."

The other effort relied on the giant Keck and Gemini telescopes in Hawaii to take images of three planets surrounding the young star HR8799, 130 light-years -- about 800 trillion miles -- away.

Scientists compared the imaging of these so-called exoplanets to taking a picture from Los Angeles of a firefly buzzing around a searchlight in New York.

"We've been trying to image planets for eight years with no luck and now we have pictures of three planets at once," said Bruce MacIntosh, an astrophysicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and one of the leaders of the effort.

Both discoveries were released Thursday by the journal Science and presented at a news conference at NASA headquarters in Washington.

"These two papers will represent a milestone in the field that people will look back on years from now," said Benjamin Zuckerman, an astronomer at UCLA and a member of the Keck-Gemini team.

Finding Earth-like planets has been a dream of scientists and authors for centuries. Over the last decade, astronomers have found more than 300 exoplanets, but they have all been detected indirectly -- by the slight wobble their gravity causes in their parent stars.

The big challenge to actually seeing planets is that their faint reflected light is easily overwhelmed by the glow of their parent stars.

The two teams used different techniques to solve that problem. To tease out Fomalhaut b, Berkeley's Kalas relied on Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys, fitted with a coronagraph to screen out the star's light.