What an astonishing photograph -- if you know what you're looking at. That red blob to the southwest may well be the first planet ever photographed orbiting another star. Astronomers arent quite sure. It could also be an object known as a "brown dwarf," essentially a star that never started working. It's orbiting another brown dwarf named 2M1207.

But whatever it is, precisely, it is truly amazing to look at.

Up till now, we've detected dozens of extra-solar worlds, but only indirectly -- by inferring their existence from the way their gravity makes their "sun" jiggle. Now we're looking at one face-to-face.

This one, if it is indeed a planet, is too big for anything we'd recognize as life to dwell there. But this picture means that eventually we'll have photos of earth-sized worlds around other stars.

Perhaps they'll even be blue.