Astronomers have succeeded in taking the first visible light snapshot of a planet outside our home solar system.

The Hubble space telescope photographed the planet Fomalhaut b after researchers spent eight years attempting to pinpoint it.

The planet’s existence had been known since 2005 because its gravity had shaped the inner edge of a dust belt around its parent star, but it was only in May this year that researchers were able to pick it out in photographs taken by Hubble in 2004 and 2006.

“It’s a profound and overwhelming experience to lay eyes on a planet never before seen,” said Dr Paul Kalas, of the University of California, Berkeley, in the United States. “I nearly had a heart attack at the end of May when I confirmed that Fomalhaut b orbits its parent star."

The planet, which is estimated to be the same size as Jupiter, is in an 872-year orbit about 11 billion miles (four times the distance of Neptune from the Sun) from its home star, Fomalhaut, which is in the constellation Piscis Austrinus, the Southern Fish.

Dr Kalas believes the planet has huge rings around it “so vast it would make Saturn's rings look pocket-sized by comparison”.

He said: “Fomalhaut b may actually show us what Jupiter and Saturn resembled when the solar system was about a hundred million years old.

“Fomalhaut b sits in a frigid location, but it’s not too different from that of Neptune in our solar system.”

The planet’s star is about 200 million years old and is expected to die in a billion years. The Sun, by comparison is about 4.5 billion years old and should last another 5 billion but Fomalhaut burns about 16 times brighter.

Researchers hope to add to the two photographs they have of the planet, 21 months apart, when repair work on Hubble’s cameras is completed.

One of the puzzles they hope to solve is why the planet dimmed significantly in between the two images being recorded.

James Graham, professor of astronomy at UC Berkeley, said the limited data on the planet recorded to date suggests that it has plenty of surprises in store.

“This is not your theorist’s ideal planet, it is obviously more complicated than we thought,” he said as the research team findings were published by the journal Science.

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