[NOTE: There is some controversy over whether the planet seen in this image exists. Read here for more.]

When this picture of the nearby bright star Fomalhaut was released by Hubble, I had to laugh. We got a picture of Sauron's eye!

The star is actually not seen in this image; it's so bright the light from it was masked and subtracted away so that fainter objects could be seen. Amazingly, this bright ring of material popped right out of the picture; it's a vast circle of dust 36 billion km (21 billion miles) across.

Hidden in that picture is the exoplanet Fomalhaut b. It looked like just another pixel of noise in the first 2004 image, but was seen to move a little bit in an image taken in 2006. It took two more years to confirm it, but then the announcement was made in 2008: the second extrasolar planet had been directly seen!

It orbits Fomalhaut at a distance of 18 billion km (10.7 billion miles), but its mass is unknown, though estimated from to be about three times that of Jupiter (if it were any more massive, it would noticeably distort the ring). Amazingly, the star is about one billion times brighter than the planet, giving you an idea of how freaking hard these observations are.

Original blog post: HUGE EXOPLANET NEWS ITEMS: PICTURES!!!

Credit: NASA, ESA, P. Kalas, J. Graham, E. Chiang, E. Kite (University of California, Berkeley), M. Clampin (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center), M. Fitzgerald (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory), and K. Stapelfeldt and J. Krist (NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory)