Astronomers using the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (VLT) have captured the first direct images of two planets orbiting a Sun-like star, located just 300 light-years from Earth.
While over 4,000 exoplanets have been discovered in more than 2,800 systems, most were detected indirectly through methods like transits or radial velocity. Direct imaging remains rare, making each new photograph a milestone.
This breakthrough features a young star system only 300 light-years away, marking the first time multiple planets have been directly imaged around a star resembling our Sun.
The images were obtained using the SPHERE instrument (Spectro-Polarimetric High-Contrast Exoplanet REsearch) on the VLT in Chile's Atacama Desert, operated by ESO. SPHERE employs a coronagraph to block the host star's blinding light, revealing the planets otherwise hidden in its glare.
At just 17 million years old, the host star TYC 8998-760-1 is a cosmic infant compared to our 4.6-billion-year-old Sun.
Its two gas giant planets orbit at vast distances: the inner one at ~320 AU (1 AU = Earth-Sun distance, ~150 million km), the outer at 160 AU. By contrast, Jupiter and Saturn lie at 5 and 10 AU from our Sun.
These behemoths are massive: the closer planet is 14 times Jupiter's mass, the farther one six times.
This system's youth and proximity make it an ideal lab for studying planetary formation and migration—key questions like whether giants form near their stars and migrate outward, or via other mechanisms.
Details are published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
