Around a Star Far, Far Away

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A picture, even one as fuzzy as this, is still worth a thousand inferences. Today's proof: a shot from the Hubble Space Telescope that NASA says is the first photograph of a planet outside our solar system. Until now, the existence of extrasolar planets had only been inferred by indirect means such as gravitational wobbles. Even though it's just a speck in the lower left-hand corner of this photo, the planet is two to three times the size of Jupiter, and is orbiting a binary star system in the constellation Taurus about 450 light-years from Earth.