Array stores timezone schedule. Configuration for menus. The Hubble Space Telescope has captured the first actual image of a planet outside our own solar system, NASA said Thursday. The planet is two to three times the size of Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system, and is about 450 light-years away from Earth. It is believed that the planet may have been flung about 130 billion miles from a pair of newly born binary stars that ejected it.
Binary stars are two stars very close together and orbiting each other.
Astronomers have believed that planets outside our solar system existed because of wobbles in the motion of stars a planet's gravitational pull can make the star it orbits wobble. But, now with the help of the Hubble Space Telescope, NASA says they've got a picture perhaps the most important discovery yet made by Hubble. Future observations will be needed to confirm that it is a planet. For more on the Hubble, see Space Telescope Science Institute , the astronomical research center responsible for operating the Hubble Space Telescope as an international observatory. Canada Inc. Discovery Canada 2001.