Tag Archives: take-the-planet

See that little dot in the upper left corner? It is a planet orbiting a sun-like star. We know of a few hundred planets like this, but this one is special — we now know it's the first one to have its picture properly taken from Earth. The adaptive optics system at the Gemini Observatory in Hawaii snapped this photo in the infrared part of the light spectrum. It shows a hot, large Jupiter-like planet near a smallish sun-like star. It was actually found two years ago, but astronomers couldn't be sure they were really looking at a planetary system and not some lucky alignment of objects. Now they're sure. “Our new observations rule out this chance alignment possibility, and thus confirms that the planet and the star are related to each other,” says David Lafreni