Astronomers Capture Image Of Alien Planet Orbiting A 'Sun'

From The Telegraph:

Astronomers believe they have captured the first picture of an alien planet in orbit around a star that is similar to our own Sun.

Images of a young star and what is thought to be its companion planet have been taken by astronomers using the Gemini North telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii.

However they are puzzelled by the distance between the two.

Located around 500 light-years from Earth, the planet in the snapshot is around eight times bigger than Jupiter, the biggest in our solar system and lies more than ten times further from its star than the sun does from Neptune.

Even though the likelihood of a chance alignment between such an object and a similarly young star is thought to be small, it will take up to two years to verify that the star and its likely planet are moving through space together.

The parent star - called 1RXS J160929.1-210524 - is similar in mass to the Sun, but is much younger.

"This is the first time we have directly seen a planetary mass object in a likely orbit around a star like our Sun," said David Lafrenicre, one of the three University of Toronto scientists who describe the fascinating object in a paper submitted to the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

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