space.com reports that astronomers have photographed a planet outside our solar system for the first time. This is actually confirmation from the Hubble telescope, of an observation made last fall from the European Southern Observatory. At that point it wasn’t clear that the two objects were actually gravitationally bound together – Hubble seems to have confirmed that.
The brown dwarf star that the planet is orbiting weighs about 25 times as much as Jupiter; the planet, which orbits at a distance greater than that of Pluto, weighs about 5 times what Jupiter does. The discovery lends confidence that future proposed planet imaging attempts will eventually be able to return pictures of Earth-like planets around Sun-like stars. It also suggests that there may be many planets out there not gravitationally bound in any solar system. These are definitely interesting times in expanding our knowledge of the universe around us!