This artist’s impression shows several comets speeding across a vast protoplanetary disc of gas and dust and heading straight for the youthful, central star of the system. These 'kamikaze' comets will eventually plunge into the star and vaporise. The comets are too small to be imaged, but their gaseous spectral 'fingerprints' on the star's light were detected with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. The gravitational influence of a suspected Jupiter-sized planet in the foreground may have catapulted the comets into the star.

This star, called HD 172555, represents the third extrasolar system where astronomers have detected doomed, wayward comets. The star resides 95 light-years from Earth.

Credit:
NASA/ESA and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

This is the image of a Jupiter-mass planet orbiting the nearby star Epsilon Eridani. Located 10.5 light-years away, it is the closest known extrasolar planet to our solar system. The planet is in an elliptical orbit that carries it as close to the star as Earth is from the Sun, and as far from the star as Jupiter is from the Sun.

Epsilon Eridani is a young star, only 800 million years old. It is still surrounded by a disk of dust that extends 30 billion kilometres from the star. The disk appears as a linear sheet of reflecting dust in this view because it is seen edge-on from the planet's orbit, which is in the same plane as the dust disk.

The planet's rings and satellites are purely hypothetical in this view, but plausible. As a gas giant, the planet is uninhabitable for life as we know it. However, any moons might have conditions suitable for life.

Astronomers determined the planet's mass and orbital tilt in 2006 by using Hubble to measure the unseen planet's gravitational pull on the star as it slowly moved across the sky. Evidence for the planet first appeared in 2000 when astronomers measured a telltale wobble in the star.

Credit:
NASA, ESA, and G. Bacon (STScI)