[The following is an exact transcript of this podcast.] Science
fiction is filled with stories of planets circling distant
stars. Now astronomers have produced the first image of multiple
planets circling a star that’s not our sun. The planets are five
to thirteen times more massive than Jupiter. And their order by
size mimics our own solar system. The discovery is in the
November 14th issue of the journal Science. Astronomers faced a
big challenge finding those planets: telescopes can’t just catch
a planet in orbit. So a common method is to determine the
planets’ gravitational pull on their home star. But that only
works for planets whose orbit is relatively close to their sun.
Newer procedures measure infrared radiation from recently formed
planets. And a technique called adaptive optics is also used to
create images of planets. It corrects for the fact that the
glare of the home star makes nearby planets difficult to see. It
was adaptive optics that made the new solar system visible to
us. In other world n