Jan 8th 2014, 14:38, by Katie Drummond
The image above might not look like much, but what it shows is in fact stunning: a 10-million-year-old planet called Beta Pictorus b, located around 63 light years from Earth, orbiting around its giant parent star. And images like this one are poised to become much more common, thanks to the launch of a camera that'll vastly improve our abilities to detect far-off planetary systems.
The Gemini Planet Imager (GPI), a collaborative international effort among institutions including NASA, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and the University of California, Berkeley, has been in development for nearly a decade. This week, however, researchers unveiled the camera's first shots of distant planets, which were snapped from the Gemini...
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