Images of distant exoplanets, once only a wish for future space missions, have begun to turn up with a certain regularity. The three planets around HR8799 and the single gas giant around Fomalhaut were announced on the same day, while a week later we once again have Beta Pictoris in focus, a young star so well studied that images of its dust disk go back to the mid-1980s. A new analysis of 2003 data from the Very Large Telescope now brings a team of French astronomers to offer a probable -- but not certain -- image of what may turn out to be Beta Pictoris b. The observations seem to show a gas giant some eight times more massive than Jupiter, orbiting at roughly 8 AU, not far inside Saturn's orbit in our own Solar System. But astronomer Gael Chauvin (Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de l’Observatoire de Grenoble) is quick to qualify the finding: "We cannot yet rule out definitively, however, that the candidate companion could be a foreground or background object. To eliminate this very...

The images of planets around Fomalhaut and HR8799 carried more clout than I expected, with traffic to the site quadrupling when the story ran, and substantial coverage from major media outlets as well. I ran the exciting images of both stars and their companions, but because I enjoy astronomical artwork, I now want to include the visualization below, showing Fomalhaut b surrounded by a large ring of autumnal russet and gold. Note, too, the extensive debris disk surrounding the distant star. Orbiting every 872 years, Fomalhaut b lies some 2.9 billion kilometers inside that disk's inner edge. Credit: ESA, NASA, and L. Calcada (ESO for STScI). Greg Laughlin (University of California, Santa Cruz) was surprised at the even-handed media treatment of HR8799, considering the brightness of Fomalhaut ('A star with a name like a rocket'), not to mention the acknowledged skills of the Hubble Space Telescope's media office. But while HR8799 isn't exactly a household word, the faint object trumps...

Are we really moving beyond indirect detection methods to being able to produce actual images of extrasolar planets? Apparently so, as witness the first direct images of multiple planets around a normal main sequence star. And on the same day, we have the announcement of a visible light image of a Jupiter-class planet orbiting the star Fomalhaut, one suspected for several years because of the sharply defined inner edge of the dust belt around the star. A planet in an elliptical orbit affecting the debris disk had been thought to be offsetting the inner edge of the belt. Let's go to the planets found around the dusty young star HR8799 first. They range from seven to ten times the mass of Jupiter. Bruce Macintosh (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory), one of the authors of a new paper on the achievement in Science Express, explains its significance: "Every extrasolar planet detected so far has been a wobble on a graph. These are the first pictures of an entire system. We've been...

Roughly twenty percent of all detected exoplanets are in binary systems, intensifying our interest in Alpha Centauri. Recent work, however, has been less than encouraging to those hoping to find one or more terrestrial worlds around these stars. Indeed, Philippen Thébault (Stockholm Observatory), Francesco Marzari (University of Padova) and Hans Scholl (Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur) have shown that in the case of Centauri A, the zone beyond 0.5 AU is hostile to the accretion processes that allow planets to form. Any terrestrial-class world that close to Centauri A would be excluded from the habitable zone, a region thought to extend from 1.0 to 1.3 AU around the star. The same team now goes to work on Centauri B, having pointed out in the earlier paper that the mathematical modeling it used there was unique to Centauri A and could not be applied indiscriminately to other systems, not even to the second star of the Centauri binary. The authors are targeting the phase of planetary...