It’s Deep
This the first confirmed photo of an extrasolar planet. In other words, this is the first planet outside of our own solar system that we’ve ever seen directly. (The planet is the tiny dot in the upper middle left; the big thing in the middle is its star.) We can detect planets without seeing them, usually by the gravitational wobble that they create on their stars. However, the distances between the stars is so vast it’s impossible to actually “see” those planets until now. This photo was taken from about 500 light years away, so the light reflecting off this planet bounced off of it sometime shortly after Columbus arrived in the New World. Put another way, this light has traveled approximately 3,000,000,000,000,000 miles to get here. In comparison, the Milky Way is 100,000 light years in diameter, and it’s just one of billions upon billions of galaxies in the universe. Makes you feel kinda small, doesn’t it?