For the first time, a telescope has captured a family portrait of another solar system with not just one, but two planets posing directly for the cameras while orbiting a star like our sun. The snapshot — released Wednesday — was taken by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile’s Atacama Desert. The observations can help scientists better understand the evolution of our own solar system. The researchers took multiple images of this youthful solar system over the past year to verify the findings, while reviewing older data. Future instruments like ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope, still five years away, should be able to detect even smaller, less dense planets.

Source: The Standard July 22, 2020 14:07 UTC