Space Travel
11, Feb, 2012

First Exoplanet Discovered?
Written by spacetravel.org   
Astronomers from the American Astronomical Society say that Hubble’s NICMOS (Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer) camera has very likely captured the first ever image of a planet outside our Solar System. The suspected exoplanet is located near to a young brown dwarf 225 light-years away in Hydra, the astronomers are unsure as to whether the planet is orbiting the brown dwarf or not.


Astronomers at the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile detected a possible planet around the brown dwarf, 2MASSWJ 1207334, in April 2004 but they were unable to confirm their findings. The possible new planet had a surface temperature of 1,250 kelvins, which is not as hot as a standard light bulb filament; the planet shines at one hundredth the brightness of the nearby brown dwarf.


Glenn Schneider, the astronomer from the University of Arizona who led the team studying the object with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) said:


“The NICMOS positions, relative to the VLT’s, indicate it’s a true companion.” Glenn Schneider believes the chances of the object not being a planet are less than 1% and says that if it is a planet, “it has about 5 times the mass of Jupiter,” he also says that a year for the new planet is equivalent to 2500 Earth years.
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