How would our solar system look from the vicinity of another star? Using technologies similar to ours, alien astronomers would have a tough time photographing our small, rocky Earth. They might more easily manage to capture images of our solar system’s biggest planets, the large gaseous worlds Jupiter and Saturn. Of the thousands of exoplanets discovered so far orbiting distant stars, earthly astronomers have captured direct images of only a very few. In each of these images, only one planet can be seen. Now astronomers say they’ve acquired a first-ever direct image of two giant exoplanets, orbiting a sunlike star. 

The astronomers were using the SPHERE instrument on the Very Large Telescope (VLT) of the European Southern Observatory. The exciting peer-reviewed results were published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters on July 22, 2020.

This planetary system orbits the star TYC 8998-760-1. It’s 300 light-years away in the direction of the southern constellation Musca the Fly. The system seems to resemble our own solar system, but is much younger.