The First Image of an Extra Solar Planet

It's the faint red object, not the bright white one that might be a historic find. The white object is surely a brown dwarf star . Quite possibly, however, the red object is the first direct image of a planet beyond our Solar System . The intriguing possibility was first reported last year, but many astronomers weren't then convinced that the “planet” was not just a background star. Earlier this year, the 2M1207 star system was imaged twice more in an effort to resolve the issue. To the delight of the scientific team , the objects kept the same separation, indicating that they are gravitationally bound . The faint red object 2M1207b is therefore 100 times fainter, intrinsically, than the bright white brown dwarf 2M1207a -- a characteristic well explained by a planet roughly five times the mass of Jupiter . The discovery - still subject to further confirmation - is considered a step toward the more ambitious goal of imaging Earth-like planets orbiting distant stars. The above image was taken with the high-resolution adaptive-optic NaCo camera attached to the 8-meter Very Large Telescope Yepun in Chile .