When will the first image of an exoplanet be obtained?
This kind of research is very exciting, but also demands great care. A recent event illustrates this. Just a few months ago, the present astronomer team detected a companion candidate to another young star on their list (TWA-7). This object was 100,000 times fainter than and only 2.5 arcsec away from TWA-7. If it were a true companion orbiting TWA-7, its mass would have been only 3 Jupiter masses (as deduced from the observed brightness) and it would thus very likely have been a true exoplanet. However, an infrared spectrum subsequently taken with the ISAAC instrument at VLT/ANTU showed that it was in fact a background star, located almost 10,000 light-years farther away than TWA-7! Despite the negative result, those observations clearly showed that direct detection and subsequent, effective spectroscopic verification of extra-solar planets is now quite feasible with a ground-based facility like the VLT. It is thus not a very daring prediction that the ongoing searches may soon lead to
