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Credit: NASA, ESA, and R. Soummer (STScI)
By Ian O'Neill
Hubble has done it again. The 21-year old space telescope has managed to pick out the impossibly faint glow from three worlds orbiting another star! However, this is a discovery with a huge difference: the image containing the star and its family of exoplanets was acquired in 1998.
1998? Why is this discovery only just being announced 13 years later? Well, that's where the clever bit comes in.Time for a little background: In 2008, an incredible thing happened; the first direct observations of exoplanets from two astronomical studies swamped the world's media. Although exoplanets had been detected indirectly before then, the Hubble optical light photo of the star Fomalhaut, and the Keck/Gemini observatories' infrared imagery of the star HR 8799 showed tiny pinpricks of light orbiting the stars.
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