Astronomers’ gaze turns to new ‘planet’

A TEAM of European and American astronomers said over the weekend that they had for the first time directly observed a planet outside of our solar system.

New images taken of an object five times the mass of Jupiter confirmed it is a giant planet closely orbiting a distant star, the experts said.

The team first spotted the object last year as a faint reddish speck of light circling a dim brown dwarf or failed star 225 light-years away from Earth near the constellation Hydra. At the time, scientists guessed the faint light was a planet, but said further observation was needed.

The discovery touched off a debate over whether the object was actually a planet or a background star.

Since the mid-1990s, scientists have discovered more than 130 of these so-called extrasolar planets by indirect means, but observing them directly has proved difficult.

Refined images taken earlier this year by a telescope in northern Chile show two separate objects bound by gravity moving together, according to Gael Chauvin, an astronomer at the European Southern Observatory, who led the team.

"Our new images show convincingly that this really is a planet, the first planet that has ever been imaged outside of our solar system," Dr Chauvin said.

Lynne Hillenbrand, an assistant professor of astronomy at the California Institute of Technology, said the findings were intriguing, but cautioned against calling the object a planet.

"The claim of an object being a planet is subject to one's definition of planet and there are different camps on what that definition is," she said.