Extra solar planet close enough to be clicked

A Jupiter sized planet has been observed by Hubble Space Telescope which is located merely 10.5 light years away.

Researchers at the McDonald Observatory at the University of Texas at Austin confirmed the existence of a planet, 1.5 times the mass of Jupiter orbiting the sun-like star, Epsilon Eridani -- a cosmic neighbor just 10.5 light years away.

That is so close that astronomers may be able to snap the planet's picture in reflected starlight when it orbits close to its sun next year.

That would mark the first time a planet outside our own solar system has been photographed. Seeing a planet is difficult because of the intensity of the star it's orbiting. Most planets are discovered by measuring their gravitational pull on the stars they orbit.

The research team used astrometry, the precise measurement of motion and position of astronomical bodies, along with data gathered from ground-based telescopes to come up with their findings.

This development was announced today at the 38th Annual Division of Planetary Sciences Meeting in Pasadena, California.

NASA says images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope finally confirm predictions made by Emanuel Kant, made over 200 years ago, about planets forming from dust.

The planet is being estimated to have mass 1.5 times that of Jupiter and is orbiting the star every 6.9 years.

Epsilon Eridani is much younger than our sun - only 800 million years old - so its disk has not yet dissipated. Sun is a middle-aged star of 4.5 billion years, and its debris disk dissipated long ago.

The planet had been detected in the year 2000; however data regarding the star has been collected over 12 years by the ground based observatory while Hubble has been observing it for just 3 years.

The Hubble Space Telescope has up till now spied upon sixteen extra-solar planets during a survey of 180,000 stars in the central bulge of the Milky Way galaxy. The findings suggest that there could be as many as six billion Jupiter-sized planets in our galaxy.

This find has pushed the total count of planets outside solar system known to us to 211.

The University of Pittsburgh and its Allegheny Observatory participated in this research confirming that planets form from disks of gas and dust that surround stars.

The core research team comprised of G. Fritz Benedict and Barbara E. McArthur of the University of Texas.