Young, Massive, and Hot

There is something deeply satisfying about living in a time when universe-spanning discoveries are made on a fairly regular basis, every few years, or months... or weeks... (of course, this depends on how easily you get excited). Imagine living in the Middle Ages, and twiddling your thumbs for a few hundred years, waiting for someone to rediscover that the earth moves around the sun. Boooooooring.

Even back when I was a kid (which isn't that long ago) the universe was much smaller than it is today. We had to crouch.

Anyway, I'm very excited that two teams of astronomers have (separately) just managed to take the first photographs of planets whizzing round other stars. These planets are young, massive and hot (they're the easiest ones to photograph because they're pouring out torrents of infrared. Or heat as we called it when I was a lad). Up until now, astronomers had been finding planets by indirect means (the wobble of a star as a vast planet invisibly circled it, the dimming of a star as a big invisible planet passed in front of it). These are the first direct sightings.

All the details here, in Science News.