Recently, two teams of astronomers that managed to capture the first images of planets that are outside of our solar system have published their findings, the pictures released by NASA featuring four such planets in the form of small bits of white, which renders them available for analysis only for top notch experts.

All the planets are trillions of miles away, with three of them orbiting the same star, while the fourth orbits a different one, astronomers said. Nevertheless, they are not inhabitable, although the discovery has raised hopes of spotting Earthlike planets in the future.

The first team was led by Bruce Macintosh of the Lawrence Livermore National Lab, the astronomers having used two ground-based telescopes to take the snaps, while the second team placed their bets on images taken by NASA’s Hubble Telescope.

Research with regards to the exoplanets (planets that do not orbit our sun) has been published by the two teams in Thursday's online edition of the journal Science.

During a news conference that was held Thursday, NASA's space sciences chief Ed Weiler has stated that the photos represented the accomplishment of the Hubble Telescope’s major mission, deeming the spotting of the four planets as a 18-year-old dream that had finally come true.

Still, there are some who have downplayed the importance of the discovery, claiming that further evidence was needed in order to prove that the snaps really showed actual planets and not just mere stars. The group of skeptics includes exoplanet expert at the Carnegie Institution of Washington Alan Boss and Harvard exoplanet hunter Lisa Kaltenegger.

The planet that was discovered by the second team back in 2006 with the aid of Hubble is one of the smallest exoplanets, even though it is three times bigger than Jupiter, and orbits the star Fomalhaut from the Piscis Austrinus constellation. Moreover, research has showed that it is located 148 trillion miles away, while its temperature has been reported at approximately 260 degrees.

Bruce Macintosh’s team took the images of the other three planets starting 2007, when the first of the three was discovered, all of them having been reported to be orbiting a star in the Pegasus constellation called HR 8799, which is 767 trillion miles away. The team revealed that the exoplanets were all 7 to 10 times larger than Jupiter.