Images: Hubble observes planet obiting another star
From images taken by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, for the first time astronomers have spotted a planet orbiting a star outside our solar system.
The planet, Fomalhaut b, maintains an orbit around the star Fomalhaut, has three times the mass of Jupiter, and is an estimated 21.5 billion miles across.
“Our Hubble observations were incredibly demanding. Fomalhaut b is 1 billion times fainter than the star. We began this program in 2001, and our persistence finally paid off,” said Hubble astronomer Paul Kalas, of the University of California at Berkeley.