How about right here!
This image was obtained as follows: You can download a picture of 51 Pegasi from the Palomar Digital Sky Survey archive by entering '51 Peg' in the OBJECT NAME window. Alternately, you can enter its Right Ascension and Declination coordinates if you know them. Click on GET COORDINATES bar and after a few seconds it will refresh the screen with the coordinate information for the star. Skip down to the RETRIEVE IMAGE area and under FILE FORMAT click the down arrow to bring up the two options. Click on GIF, then click on the box that says SAVE TO DISK. An 'X' in this box will save the GIF image to your local disk file. Finally click on the RETRIEVE IMAGE bar. In a miniute or so, the DSS routine will deliver to you a GIF image covering a 15 x 15 arcminute field centered on the star. It will also bring up a window where you choose a name for this image on your harddrive. The file will be about 150 - 200 kilobytes in size. You will see a bright star in the center of the field. That's 51 Pegasi.
The photo was taken with the 48-inch Schmidt Camera at Mount Palomar Observatory, and just shows a bright star with the usual diffraction spikes that are typical of reflecting-type telescopes. Obviously you cannot see the planet, which is totally lost in the glare of the star. The size of this image is about 5 arcminutes, and at a distance of 42 light years that corresponds to about 0.06 light years or 348 billion miles, about 4 times the diameter of the orbit of Pluto!
51 Pegasi is a bright star similar to the Sun, but about 3- 4 billion years older. A recent investigation of it by astronomers Michael Mayor and Didier Queloz of the Geneva Observatory in Switzerland has shown that it may have an unseen companion with a mass similar to that of Jupiter. The orbit for this planet would have a 'year' only 4 days long, which means the planet is orbiting practically inside the 1,800 F outer corona of the star at a distance of only 5 million miles or so. The planet has not many years to survive this, but what is exciting is that if this planet can be confirmed, there may possibly be more planets orbiting this star. One possibility is that the planet only recently arrived in its present orbit, having been injected into this orbit from a collision in the outer solar system of the star.
Soon after the original discovery, US astronomers Geoffrey MArcy at San Francisco State University and Paul Butler at U.C. Berkeley confirmed the discovery by detecting the periodic Doppler shift in the speed of 51 Pegasi as the unseen companion made its orbit. Apparently from the initial reports, many alternative explanations have been considered to account for the Doppler measurements, but none found as simple or compelling as a planetary detection.
Astronomers have a hunch that if the conditions are right for forming one planet, there ought to be many formed at the same time. Perhaps one of more with a mass similar to the Earth! Stay tuned!! I will have much more on this new discovery in the next few weeks once the articles appear in the technical literature.