A young star and its planet?

A young star and perhaps its companion planet have been photographed by astronomers at the Gemini North telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii.

About 500 light-years from Earth, the planet is about eight times bigger than Jupiter, and more than ten times away from its star than the sun is from Neptune.

However, it will take about two years to make sure it's a solar system.

The parent star - called 1RXS J160929.1-210524 - has about Sun's mass, but is a lot younger. For the first time we have directly observed a planet around a star like the Sun.

It is now necessary to check if this object is actually gravitationally tied to the star.Up to now, the only planet-like objects directly seen outside of our solar system are alone in space, or orbiting brown dwarfs, much dimmer, and therefore make it easier to detect planetary-mass bodies.

This discovery highlights the remarkable diversity of worlds out there, and is a clue that there may be more mechanisms for producing planetary mass companions to normal stars.

Observations made use of adaptive optics technology to reduce distortions caused by Earth's atmosphere, which is why stars twinkle when viewed without optics equipment.

Caution is necessary before saying that the object is orbiting this star, but the evidence is strong. It belongs to a survey of 85 stars in the Upper Scorpius association, a clutch of young stars formed about 5 million years ago.

Cientists look for young stars so that any planetary mass object they hosted would still be warm, and consequently relatively bright.

The body has a temperature of +/- 1,500ºC, far hotter than Jupiter, where temperature is -110ºC, and its host's mass isabout 85% that of the Sun.

Since 1995, over 300 planets so-called exoplanets have been found.