ASTRONOMERS have produced what could be the first picture of a planet orbiting another star. They have photographed a reddish object apparently orbiting a star called GQ Lup, which lies more than 400 light years from earth, writes Jonathan Leake.

If confirmed, the picture would be the first direct image obtained of a planet outside the solar system.

More than 150 such planets have been detected indirectly, by measuring fluctuations in the movements or light emissions of their parent star. However, none has been seen because the light they emit is overwhelmed by the much brighter glare of the neighbouring star.

The astronomers were able to photograph the planet around GQ Lup because the two are separated by a much greater distance than normal. “It is the first planet shining to us from the sky of another system,” said Gunther Wuchterl of Jena University in Germany.

Wuchterl and Professor Ralph Neuhaeuser, also of Jena University, used the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope, with its 30ft mirror, based in Chile.

Last month a team using the Spitzer telescope, a space-based instrument, announced they could pick out the radiation from a Jupiter-size planet orbiting another star.

Details of the new discovery, to be published by the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics, were given a cautious welcome by other astronomers. They acknowledge that the photograph is a scientific breakthrough, but some say the planet may actually be a brown dwarf — a giant ball of hot gas that glows but is not quite big enough to turn into a fully fledged star.

Ian Crawford, a planetary scientist at Birkbeck College in London, said more measurements are needed. “The great distance between these two objects would be more typical of a brown dwarf so we have to be careful before declaring it to be a planet,” he said.

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