In 2008, a group of researchers thought they had directly imaged the first exoplanet. Since then, that remarkable feat has been accomplished a few times, but now the 2008 imaging has been confirmed. At that time, there was a possibility the two objects, the star and the exoplanet, were only coincidentally related as seen from Earth. Continued observation, however, has confirmed the two travel through space together.
The star is Sun-like, with about 85 percent the mass of the Sun, while its planet is about eight times Jupiter's mass and orbits the star about once every 300 Earth years, if the orbit is close to circular. That's somewhere around the same distance Neptune is from the Sun. The exoplanet is extremely hot, however-- which is what allowed it to be detected in the first place. Astronomers think it's a young system, and the planet is still gravitationally contracting, which generates a huge amount of waste heat.
The whole shebang is about 500 light years away.
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