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Four worlds 133 light-years away orbiting a young star. (Jason Wang/Northwestern University) ********************************************************* A new video shared on YouTube is one of the most amazing things we've ever seen in planetary science. The video shows four dots of light moving in partial concentric circles around a black disk at their center. What you're actually looking at is a planetary system. The four dots are exoplanets, with the black disk obscuring their star, 133.3 light-years away from Earth. The partial circles are their orbital motions, a time-lapse compiled from 12 years of observations. The star is HR8799, and in 2008 its...

An alien star has now been discovered to have an extra planet that astronomers so far cannot explain. A fourth planet has been imaged orbiting the bright, very young star HR 8799, nearly 130 light-years away. This newfound world is at least seven times the mass of Jupiter, roughly the same as a trio of other giant planets astronomers had seen circling the star two years ago in the first direct images of extrasolar planets.

Kastner used the 30-meter radiotelescope operated by the Institut de Radio Astronomie Millimetrique (IRAM) to study radio molecular spectra emitted from the vicinity of the two stars in a binary system called V4046 Sgr, which lies about 210 light-years away from our solar system. (V4046 Sgr is the 4046th brightest variable-brightness star in the constellation Sagittarius.) The scientists found "in large abundance" raw materials for planet formation around the nearby stars, including circumstellar carbon monoxide and hydrogen cyanide, in the noxious molecular gas cloud. The young stars, approximately 10 million years old, are close in proximity to each other --...

The Hubble Space Telescope has spotted an exoplanet in an image that was captured 10 years ago, which raises hope that more planets lie buried in Hubbles vast archive. In 1998, Hubble studied the star HR 8799 in the infrared, as part of a search for planets around young and relatively nearby stars. The search came up empty. Last year, Christian Marois of the Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, and colleagues looked at the same star using the Gemini North telescope in Hawaii. They discovered three planets, each about 10 times as massive as Jupiter. They...

The first-ever pictures of planets outside the solar system have been released in two studies. Using the latest techniques in space technology, astronomers at NASA and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory used direct-imaging techniques to capture pictures of four newly discovered planets orbiting stars outside our solar system. "After all these years, it's amazing to have a picture showing not one but three planets," said physicist Bruce Macintosh of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California. "The discovery of the HR 8799 system is a crucial step on the road to the ultimate detection of another Earth," he said....

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has taken the first visible-light snapshot of a planet circling another star. Estimated to be no more than three times Jupiter's mass, the planet, called Fomalhaut b, orbits the bright southern star Fomalhaut, located 25 light-years away in the constellation Piscis Australis, or the "Southern Fish."Fomalhaut has been a candidate for planet hunting ever since an excess of dust (a telltale sign of planet formation) was discovered around the star in the early 1980s by NASA's Infrared Astronomy Satellite, IRAS. In 2004, the coronagraph in the High Resolution Camera on Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys produced...