The US space agency said Thursday its Hubble Space Telescope has captured the first image, taken in visible light, of a planet circling a star in another solar system, according to dpa. The planet, Fomalhaut b, is estimated to have about three times the mass of Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system. The image was taken as Fomalhaut b orbited the star Fomalhaut, which is located 25 light years from Earth in the constellation Piscis Australis or the Southern Fish. It's challenging to take such pictures as a star's glare makes it almost impossible in visible light to see any orbiting planets. This forces astronomers to look for planets indirectly by measuring the gravitational influence on the star being orbited. In the image released by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the planet appears as a tiny dot in the middle of a giant red dust ring of proto-planetary debris. This large debris disk is similar to the Kuiper Belt, which circles the solar system and contains numerous icy bodies - dust grains and even objects the size of dwarf planets, such as Pluto in Earth's own solar system. "Our Hubble observations were incredibly demanding. Fomalhaut b is 1 billion times fainter than the star. We began this programme in 2001, and our persistence finally paid off," Hubble astronomer Paul Kalas of the University of California at Berkeley said in a statement. NASA said that Fomalhaut has been a candidate for planet hunting ever since the agency's Infrared Astronomy Satellite discovered excessive dust around the star in the early 1980s. In 2004, Kalas and his team discovered the debris disk that scatters Fomalhaut's starlight. They later concluded that the ring of debris was being gravitationally modified by a planet lying between the star and the ring's inner edge. NASA confirmed that the planet is more than 17.2 billion kilometres from the star, or about 10 times the distance of Saturn from our sun. The alien planet is also brighter than expected for an object its size, probably because it has a Saturn-like ring of ice and dust that reflects starlight.
