Planet Formalhaut B Imaged by Hubble Space Telescope

First Picture of Extra Solar Planet

The Hubble Space Telescope has taken the first visible picture of a planet circling another star. The planet is named Fomalhaut b, circling the star Formalhaut which is twenty five light years distant from Earth.

Formalhaut b is a Jupiter sized world in an orbit about eleven billion miles away from Formalhaut or about four times the distance of Neptune from our own sun. Formalhaut b has an orbital period of some 872 years and may have rings "so vast it would make Saturn's rings look pocket-sized by comparison".

Astronomers were able to pinpoint Formalhaut b from two images taken up Fomalhaut between 2004 and 2006. The existence of Formalhaut b had already been confirmed by the way its gravity had shaped a dust cloud around Formalhaut.

Astronomers are, mildly speaking, ecstatic over the visual imaging of the first extra solar planet. Once the Hubble telescope is repaired, sometime next year, astronomers hope to conduct further studies of Formalhaut b.

Formalhaut is a class A star about two and a third times the mass of our Sun. Formalhaut is about two hundred million years old and, because it burns hotter than our Sun, has about a billion years of life left.

The discovery of Formalhaut b is a fluke, not likely to be repeated in the remaining operating life of the Hubble Space Telescope. The existence of planets circling other stars has been confirmed since the 1990s when they were surmised due to the effects of their gravity upon the stars they are orbiting. Most of these planets are thought to be Jupiter sized gas giants. However the Spitzer space telescope, which operates in the infrared range, recently found indications of an Earth sized planet orbiting the star Epsilon Eridani.

More visual images of planets circling other suns may have to wait for the possible deployment of a terrestrial planet finder telescope or telescopes proposed by NASA for the next decade. No actual funding has been provided for the terrestrial planet finder and its actual launch date remains uncertain.