A speck in the eye

Fomalhuat (sounds like "form-a-lot"), the 18th brightest star in the sky, can be seen without a telescope.  See that tiny white dot there?  That's it.  Just 25 light years away.   

What looks like the iris of an eye, what looks to some like the Eye of Sauron, is a dusty debris ring recorded by the Hubble telescope. 

Inside that ring, scientists says they have the first ever direct images of planets around other stars.

Paul Kalas, the lead astronomer for the Berkeley team, said he "nearly had a heart attack" when he found the new planet, which he calls Fomalhaut b.

"It's a profound and overwhelming experience to lay eyes on a planet never before seen," he said.

Finding other Earths has been a dream of scientists and authors for centuries. The big problem for all planet hunters is that stars other than our sun are far away, so far that their light overwhelms the weak reflected light of any planets, just as a lightbulb overwhelms the light from a candle.

So far, more than 200 exoplanets have been discovered. But all of the previous ones were found indirectly, mostly from the wobble their gravity causes in their parent stars.