Earth seems to have its first fuzzy photos of alien planets outside our solar system, images captured by two teams of astronomers. The pictures show four likely planets that appear as specks of white, nearly indecipherable except to the most eagle-eyed experts. All are trillions of miles away — three of them orbiting the same star, and the fourth circling a different star.
None of the four giant gaseous planets are remotely habitable or remotely like Earth. But they raise the possibility of others more hospitable.
It`s only a matter of time before `we get a dot that`s blue and Earthlike,` said astronomer Bruce Macintosh of the Lawrence Livermore National Lab. He led one of the two teams of photographers.
`It is a step on that road to understand if there are other planets like Earth and potentially life out there,` he said.
Image: NASA`s Hubble Space Telescope is back in business a few days after the orbiting observatory was brought back online, Hubble aimed its prime working camera, the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 at a target, a pair of gravitationally interacting galaxies called Arp 147 shown in this image released by NASA November 13, 2008. The image demonstrated that the camera is working exactly as it was before going offline. The two galaxies happen to be oriented so that they appear to mark the number 10. The left-most galaxy, or the `one` in this image, is relatively undisturbed apart from a smooth ring of starlight. It appears nearly on edge to our line of sight. The right- most galaxy, resembling a `zero,` exhibits a clumpy, blue ring of intense star formation.
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