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Nov. 13, 2008 -- Earth seems to have its first fuzzy photos of alien planets outside our solar system.
The images show four likely planets that appear as specks of white that are nearly indecipherable except to the most eagle-eyed astronomers. But it is evidence of the existence of something far more cosmic than a blurry dot.
"It is a step on that road to understand if there are other planets like Earth and potentially life out there," said astronomer Bruce Macintosh of the Lawrence Livermore National Lab, one of two teams of out-of-this-solar system photographers.
None of the four giant gaseous planets are remotely habitable or remotely like Earth. But they raise the possibility of others more hospitable, and Macintosh said it's only a matter of time before "we get a dot that's blue and Earthlike."
The two groups of astronomers -- one using the Hubble Space Telescope and the other using two ground telescopes -- have captured images of the exoplanets, which are what scientists call planets that don't circle our sun. Both studies were being published in Thursday's online edition of the journal Science.
In the past 13 years, scientists have discovered more than 300 planets outside our solar system, but they have done so indirectly, by measuring changes in gravity, speed or light around stars.
