BY DR EMILY BALDWIN Posted: 02 April, 2009 A powerful image
processing technique may allow astronomers to seek out
exoplanets that could be lurking in over a decade’s worth of
Hubble Space Telescope data. This new planet hunting strategy
was successfully demonstrated by David Lafreniere of the
University of Toronto, who identified an exoplanet that went
undetected in Hubble images taken in 1998 with the Near Infrared
Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS). Artist impression
of the giant planet HR 8799b, which was identified in the NICMOS
archival data in a follow-up search to see if Hubble had also
serendipitously imaged it. Image: NASA, ESA, and G. Bacon
(STScI). The exoplanet was first identified in images taken with
the Keck and Gemini North telescopes in 2007 and 2008, and is
estimated to be at least seven times Jupiter’s mass. It orbits a
dusty young star, HR 8799, which is located 130 light years
away. The new planet is the outermost of three massive gas
giants, but NICMOS was unable to observe t