First visible light detected directly from an exoplanet

The first-ever direct detection of the spectrum of visible light reflected from an exoplanet has been made by an international team of astronomers. Using the High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS) instrument at the European Southern Observatory's La Silla Observatory in Chile, the astronomers studied light from 51 Pegasi b – the first exoplanet discovered orbiting a Sun-like star. Their observations not only uncovered new properties of this well-known object, but the work is also a successful proof-of-concept demonstration of an new technique for exoplanet detection.