December 8, 2010 – Victoria, British Columbia
An international team of astronomers has discovered a fourth giant planet, HR 8799e, outside our solar system. The new planet joins the three planets that were the subjects of the first-ever images of a planetary family orbiting a star other than our Sun. The planets orbit the star HR 8799, which lies about 129 light years from Earth and is faintly visible to the naked eye.
The international team included astronomer Dr. Christian Marois of the National Research Council Canada (NRC) in Victoria, B.C., as well as astronomers from the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), and the Lowell Observatory. Their discovery was published today in Nature, and images of the fourth planet were captured at Hawaii's W. M. Keck Observatory.
