Some papers have been covering the story of the new exo planet being discovered. From NY Times. 

Astronomers from the University of Toronto have published a picture of what they say might be the first image of a planet orbiting another Sunlike star.

The planet, according to their observations, is 7 to 12 times as massive as Jupiter and is about 30 billion miles from a star known as 1RXS J160929.1-210524, about 500 light-years away in the constellation Scorpius.

The picture was taken last spring by the 270-inch diameter Gemini North Telescope on Hawaii’s Mauna Kea, using so-called adaptive optics to reduce atmospheric blurring and thus sharpen the images of both star and planet.

As PhD involves this so-called adaptive Optics. I thought I might tell you a bit about what it is. When you look up at the nights sky the stars twinkle but in reality in space they don’t they are just point sources. They twinkle because when the light passes through the atmosphere the light is distorted. Causing it to blur the 

image. In 1953 Horace Babcock proposed that a mirror could be used to compensate for this. However it was not until much later when basically computational power increased did this really come into use. So how does it work. 

Basically the mirror’s shape can be distorted. So what happens is a sensor senses the way that the image is distorted and then applies to the mirror the opposite distortion. As you can see in the image the sensor is after the mirror this is because the sensor is used to measure the preformance of the mirror and constently correct it.  

The results from Adaptive Optics can be pretty amazing. Here is a picture of a binary star system taken at Caltech . The One on the left is without correction. As you can see the image goes from a blur to quiet a sharp image of the system.