Astronomers, for the first time in the history, managed to detect light coming from planets outside our solar system.

Dr. Marcy, an astronomer at the University of California at Berkeley, names about 150 of planets orbiting other stars, discovered during the last ten years. Many of them are so-called hot Jupiters - huge gas-giants orbiting very close to their parent stars.

Two separate research teams of Goddard Space Flight Center led by NASA’s Drake Deming and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics with its supervisor David Charbonneau discovered the planets HD 209458b and TrES-1, orbiting around their stars.

The scientists, with the help of NASA’s infrared Spitzer Space Telescope, managed to separate out the planet’s contribution to the glow while it passed behind its star. The researchers found out that the TrES-1 reaches about 1,450 degrees Fahrenheit and has a reflectivity of only 31 percent, which means that it absorbs the majority of light that falls on it from its nearby star. HD 209458b instead reaches 1,574 degrees Fahrenheit. Both planets are hot enough to melt iron.

Further Spitzer observations will use a range of infrared wavelengths to gather more information, following the main hope – to find Earth-like planets with the chemical signatures of life.