astralavista

Astronomers from the European Southern Observatory settled today a year long dispute whether a big red orb five times the mass of Jupiter and orbiting a young brown dwarf star is indeed a planet. "I'm more than 99 percent confident" that the object is a planet, said Benjamin Zuckerman, UCLA professor of physics and astronomy and member of NASA's Astrobiology Institute. "The two objects are moving together; we have observed them for a year, and the new images essentially confirm our 2004 finding."
This is the first time astronomers have photographed a planet outside out solar system. Although more than 150 such extra-solar planets have been found, they were detected by measuring the wobble or the changes in luminosity of their anchor stars.
The scientists also sketched out a rough chemical make-up of the planet. They said that the spectrum of the radiation leaving the planet "presents a strong signature of water molecules, thereby confirming that it must be cold." Said Anne-Marie Lagrange of the Grenoble Observatory in France: "Our discovery represents a first step towards one of the most important goals of modern astrophysics: to characterize the physical structure and chemical composition of giant and, eventually, terrestrial-like planets.
ESO astronomer Gael Chauvin said that the giant planet "most probably did not form like the planets in our solar system. Instead it must have formed the same way our Sun formed, by a one-step gravitational collapse of a cloud of gas and dust."
The distance between the planet, labeled 2M1207b, and the brown dwarf, numbered 2M1207A, is 55 times larger than the radius of Earth's orbit around the Sun. The planet is near the southern constellation of Hydra and approximately 200 light years from Earth. It was first photographed last April.