First reported one month ago, the visual sighting of a planet around Brown Dwarf 2M1207 now comes with photographic evidence. Two, in fact; the second a gas giant orbiting AB Pictoris, a young star spinning in a disc of dust and gas like the one from which our own solar system is believed to have formed. It's heady stuff:
New images taken of an object five times the mass of Jupiter confirm that it is a giant planet closely orbiting a distant star, an international team of astronomers reported. The team of European and American astronomers said this is the first time a planet outside of our solar system has been directly observed — a claim other scientists have also made.
Strikingly, 2M1207's planet orbits at a distance twice that of Neptune; AB Pictoris' is more than nine Neptune-lengths away. Given that many confirmed exosolar planets — all of them enormous gas giants — sit in absurdly close proximity to stars, some described as being "blowtorched," these finds suggest planetary configurations more similar to our own, the detection of tiny nickel-iron planets then conceivably dependent only on Earth scientists' instrument precision.