Telescope snaps family portrait of 2 planets around baby sun

 For first time, a telescope has captured a family portrait of ar solar system with t just one, but two planets posing directly for cameras while orbiting a star like our sun.

This baby sun and its two giant gas planets are fairly close by galactic standards at 300 light-years away.

snapshot — released Wednesday — was taken by European Sourn Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile’s Atacama Desert.

What makes this group shot so appealing is it’s a “very young version of our own sun,” said Alexander Bohn of Nerlands' Leiden University, who led study.

Bohn said he was “extremely excited" about discovery. “This is first time astromers were able to capture such a shot,” he said in an email.

observations can help scientists better understand evolution of our own solar system.

Astromers typically confirm worlds around or stars by observing brief but periodic dimming of starlight, indicating an orbiting planet. Such indirect observations have identified thousands planets in our Milky Way galaxy.

It’s much harder and less common for a telescope to directly observe se so-called exoplanets. To directly spot two of m around same star is even rarer. Only two multi-planet solar systems have been spotted using direct method, both with stars quite different than our sun, according to observatory.

Of 4,183 exoplanets confirmed to date, only 48 of m have been directly imd — just 1 percent, according to NASA statistics.

Direct imaging provides humanity's best chance to detect life outside our solar system, if it exists, Bohn said. By observing light from planets mselves, atmospheres can be analyzed for molecules and elements that might suggest life.

work published in Wednesday’s Astrophysical Journal Letters reveals “a snapshot of an environment that is very similar to our solar system, but at a much earlier st of its evolution,” Bohn said.

star — officially kwn as TYC 8998-760-1 and located in Musca, or Fly, constellation — is barely 17 million years old. By contrast, our sun is 4.5 billion years old.

two newly discovered gas giants around this young star orbit at a much greater distance than Jupiter and Saturn do our sun — requiring a few thousand years to complete one revolution, or calendar year. y also weigh in with greater masses than our own outer planets.

researchers took multiple ims of this youthful solar system over past year to verify findings, while reviewing older data. A disk on telescope kwn as a coronagraph blocked starlight, exposing two much fainter planets.

Future instruments like ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope, still five years away, should be able to detect even smaller, less dense planets. main mirror will span 128 feet (39 meters), more than four times size of Very Large Telescope, making it “ world’s biggest eye on sky,” according to ESO.

For w, re is evidence that this young star has more planets, but “it is certainly possible and y might just be too faint,” Bohn said.

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