The telescopes on land have caught the first real visual images of multiple planets orbiting another star. One set of images shows three giant planets orbiting a star named HR8799 in the constellation Pegasus, about 130-light years away from Earth, and the planets are several times the mass of Jupiter. The information that other planets orbit stars is not a breakthrough, and that’s because about 300 planets have been found in this situation besides the Earth’s sun, but they have been discovered using indirect measurements, mostly looking at their effects on the gravitational fields of their suns.

The photos and the information will be published in Friday’s issue of the journal Science, and astronomers said that they used the Keck and Gemini telescopes in Hawaii to get the revolutionary pictures. These can be seen at the Web site www.gemini.edu, and they show blurred smudges that the astronomers surely say they are the planets. In another study, astronomer Paul Kalas and his colleagues used the Hubble Space Telescope in order to image a planet they call Fomalhaut b, orbiting the star Fomalhaut, 25 light years from Earth. Kalas, using two photos taken in 2004 and 2006, calculated its movements and said it’s pretty clear they represent an orbiting planet.

Unfortunately, none of the giant planets would be candidates to host life, as they’re large and hot, like Jupiter, and orbit far away from their suns. Despite these facts, astronomers are sure that there are smaller, rocky planets like Mars or Earth, which are much harder to spot, in some solar system around us. However, studying such solar systems could help astronomers understand how our planet evolved. For example, Fomalhaut b may show us how Jupiter and Saturn looked like when the solar system was about a hundred million years old.