NASA's Spitzer Marks Beginning of New Age of Planetary Science
Yay!
Being a big fan of Celestia and visualizing our universe, it sure is great news to hear of NASA for the first time seeing extrasolar planets.
To distinguish this planet glow from that of the fiery hot stars, the astronomers used a simple trick. First, they used Spitzer to collect the total infrared light from both the stars and planets. Then, when the planets dipped behind the stars as part of their regular orbit, the astronomers measured the infrared light coming from just the stars. This pinpointed exactly how much infrared light belonged to the planets.
Sure, it's not true color high quality imagery, but it sure is a whole lot different (and a lot closer to that goal
) than indirect exoplanet observations by assuming things from star behaviors. However, that method also seem to work just fine, as the planets this time "directly" observed were exoplanets previously discovered exactly that way. Now they have visual confirmation they're there too. 