A new planet?, =X Options

[EmmalieV]

Last year astronomers had photographed a red speck orbiting a distant brown dwarf –or a failed star-outside the solar system. It was debated whether it was indeed a new planet or just another failed star. Now it is beyond doubt. With the help of new clearer images it has now been confirmed to be a giant planet orbiting the star. New images taken by the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in northern Chile conclude that the first planet found outside the solar system is about 5 times the size of Jupiter.
The planet, which is situated in the Hydra constellation, is nearly 230 light years from the earth, and is orbiting the failed star at a distance of about 5 billion miles that is approximately twice the distance from which Neptune orbits about the sun. Spectroscopic measurements suggests the presence of water vapor in its atmosphere leading to the belief that it is cold like a planet rather than hot like a star. The head of the observatory team Gael Chauvin, an astronomer at the European Southern Observatory, said, "Our new images show convincingly that this really is a planet, the first planet that has ever been imaged outside of our solar system". Another member Benjamin Zuckerman, who is the professor of physics and astronomy at UCLA said, “I’m more than 99 percent confident.

This is also the first time that a planet outside of our solar system has been detected far from a star or brown dwarf -- nearly twice as far as the distance between Neptune and the sun."
Gael Chauvin and his colleagues write in the paper, “This discovery offers new perspectives for our understanding of chemical and physical properties of planetary mass objects as well as their mechanisms of formation."

This new finding has been approved to be published in the future issues of Astronomy and Astrophysics, an astronomy journal.

What do you think about that.