The Hubble Space Telescope has taken the first photograph of a planet orbiting another star. Located 25 light-years away in the constellation Piscis Australis, the planet Fomalhaut b orbits the southern star Fomalhaut. This planet is estimated to be three times the size of Jupiter.

The Infrared Astronomy Satellite (IRAS) discovered an excess of dust around Fomalhaut in the early 1980s. This led astronomers to believe there may be a large planet circling the star because this ring of debris was being modified gravitationally. In 2004, the Hubble’s High Resolution Camera photographed a ring of debris 21.5 billion miles across.

Scheduled to be launched in 2013, the James Webb Space Telescope will make observations of Fomalhaut. Webb will search for other planets in the system and probe the dust ring for an asteroid belt.

Recently, Hubble caught a glimpse of M13, one of the best-known globular clusters in the sky. Globular clusters are spread in a halo around our Milky Way galaxy, and contain some of the oldest stars in the universe. 25,000 light years from Earth, M13 has over 100,000 stars. The density of the stars near the core of this cluster is 100 times greater that the density in our sun’s neighborhood.

The red stars in M13 are red giants. The image of this globular cluster is a composite of Hubble data taken with the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 and the Advanced Camera for Surveys.

At one time, there was doubt whether other stars had planets or not. Thanks to the Hubble, we are able to take pictures of such worlds as well as such astronomical objects as M13. Hopefully, the Webb will add greatly to our knowledge of the universe.