Exoplanets seen by Hubble in 1998 finally revealed "In 1998, the Hubble Space Telescope was pointed at HR 8799, in hopes of seeing any potential planets that might be orbiting that nearby, Sun-like star. None were found… but in 2008 images using the Gemini telescope found several planets orbiting HR 8799. In fact, four planets were discovered there!
So why weren’t they seen in the Hubble data? The star was too bright, and software techniques in 1998 couldn’t sufficiently remove the star’s light to reveal the much fainter planets. But things have changed in 13 years, and astronomers went back to the old HST data, using newly-developed methods to clean the images. And lo, they saw three of the four planets!"
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