This Space for Rent

This makes me very happy

1RXS J160929.1-210524 and a friend

It’s 500 lightyears away, which puts it well into the range of unattainable goals, and even if I could get there it would be a crushingly heavy place to be, but the gemini observatory managed to get a photo of a superjovian planet (s-l-o-w-l-y) orbiting a sun-sized star.

Sure, it’s an infrared photo, so it’s kind of cheating, but I’m very happy to have actually lived long enough to see actual photographic images of the non-stellar components of other solar systems.