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After a few close calls, astronomers have finally obtained the first photograph of a planet beyond our solar system, SPACE.com has learned. And this time they're sure. The planet is thought to be one to two times as massive as Jupiter. It orbits a star similar to a young version of our Sun. The star, GQ Lupi, has been observed by a team of European astronomers since 1999. They have made three images using the Very Large Telescope (VLT) of the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Chile. The Hubble Space Telescope and the Japanese Subaru Telescope each contributed an image,...

This is an artist's concept of a Jupiter-mass planet orbiting the nearby star Epsilon Eridani. Located 10.5 light-years away, it is the closest known exoplanet to our Solar System. The planet is in an elliptical orbit that carries it as close to the star as Earth is from the Sun, and as far from the star as Jupiter is from the Sun. Epsilon Eridani is a young star, only 800 million years old. It is still surrounded by a disk of dust that extends 30 billion kilometers from the star. The disk appears as a linear sheet of reflecting dust...