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The sighting of VB 8B was made using a technique known as speckle interferometry, which eliminates most of the distortion that the earth's atmosphere causes to the faint emissions of light from so distant a body. Instead of taking one infrared exposure, the astronomers snapped 10,000 quick shots. A computer then blended all these shots into a composite image.
After considering its evidence, McCarthy's team decided to call its find a planet, or "more accurately a brown dwarf." This kind of quasi-star, whose existence was first theorized by Shiv Sharan Kumar, an astronomer at the University of Virginia, has never been observed directly before. Said Kumar of the Arizona sighting: "People wish for planets, but these are not them." — By Philip Elmer-DeWitt.
Reported by Heyden White/New York and Robert C. Wurmstedt/Tucson