Excuse me but this article needs correcting:

If the planet is 180 million ly from earth then we are looking back into our past 180 million years.

180 million years ago there were no primates on earth. Primates evolved no more recently than about 30 million years ago.

Correction please.

MIke Morris, London,

Well, Evan and Tim, language breaks down a bit when it comes to relativistic effects. The image we see tells us what the system "was" like 180 million years ago, when the light we see today started out on its journey. At that point, the planet "was" 10 million years old.

On the other hand, we usually talk about things we can see happening now in the present tense. We see the planet - it is 10 million years old.

If I look across the room I see the wall as it "was" a few billionths of a second ago - it takes that amount of time for the light to get here from there. On larger scales the principle is the same but it seems more confusing.

Jamie Gilmour, Bolton, UK

Sorry 187,000 meters P/s and its a a doctorate of physics that I'm looking for incase there are witty retorts

Not a Physics PHD just a geek, UK, UK

To Tim,
A light year is how long light travels in a year, this I roughly worked out as six million,million miles in one of our years, or 365.25 days (light travels at approximately 187 Meters P/S) so it wouldn't literally take it 180M years to get here. The Sun is, I have been told, 9.3M miles from earth and another rough calculation has told me that this would take about 19 of our years for the light to get here, I would have thought that the scientists have used the method of dectection where by they actually seen the 'shadow' of the planet passing between us and it's sun (like a lunar eclispe). I would be interested myself to hear from a Physics Dotorate on this matter though as i am only an interested Geek of sorts.

Not a Physics PHD just a geek, UK, UK

Tim & Evan,
It means the planet is now 190 million years old but we see it as it was when it was a mere 10 miliion years old.

MK, Epsom, UK

@ Evan

Remember that time & distance are effectively synonymous at these scales - When we see the planet 'now' we're seeing it as it was 180m years ago - what's 'now' for us is no longer 'now' for the object we're looking at.

Mikey, Bromley, Kent

I was going to write exactly what Tim from Lancaster wrote. How on earth do we know it exists if it is so new and yet so far away?!

Evan Dubrant, BC, Canada

Is it a high-mass planet or a low-mass brown dwarf?

Dale, Winston-Salem, NC, USA

In reply to Krishna, the planet would be big enough to see if it was in a similar position to Jupiter. However, this planet is in orbit of another star, much much more distant than Jupiter (it takes minutes for light from Jupiter to travel the distance to Earth, it takes 180 million years for light from the star this planet orbits to travel the distance from there to here). The stars themselves are considerably larger than Jupiter and extremely bright, their distance makes them appear smaller in the sky and their brightness impedes searches for planets orbitting around them. Plus there's a lot of stars out there to search, which is why it took so long to find this one.

Philip Stobbart, London, England

Well, if it's only ten million years old, and 180 million light years away, then we won't be able to see it for another 170 million years.

Tim, Lancaster,

I find this quite fascinating but why have the reseacher just discovered it now. According the the calculations, for example; 9.8 times of the planet Jupiter. This would probably be big enough to see.

krishna, London, United kingdom