Yes. As a matter of fact, in the last few years many new planets have been found and scientists expect to find many more. These planets are not in our solar system but are circling around distant stars.

Here is a picture of a recently discovered planet.

Hubble Captures Image of Possible Planet Beyond Our Solar System

Hubble Space Telescope Takes First Image of an Extrasolar Planet and Finds a Runaway World

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has given astronomers their first direct look at what is possibly a planet outside our solar system -- one apparently that has been ejected into deep space by its parent stars.

The discovery, made by Susan Terebey of the Extrasolar Research Corporation in Pasadena, California, and her team using Hubble's Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS), further challenges conventional theories about the birth and evolution of planets, and offers new insights into the formation of our own solar system.

Object TMR-1C -- Planet or Brown Dwarf?

Located in the sky within a star-forming region in the constellation Taurus, the object, called TMR-1C, appears to lie at the end of a strange filament of light that suggests it has apparently been flung away from the vicinity of a newly forming pair of binary stars.

At a distance of 450 light-years, the same distance as the newly formed stars, the candidate protoplanet would be ten thousand times less luminous than the Sun. If the object is a few hundred thousand years old, the same age as the newly formed star system which appears to have ejected it, then it is estimated to be 2 to 3 times the mass of Jupiter, the largest gas giant planet in our solar system.

Also possible is that the object is up to ten million years old, the same age as other young stars nearby, in which case it may be a giant protoplanet or a brown dwarf star. A brown dwarf star is a small star that has failed to sustain nuclear fusion.

The candidate protoplanet is now 130 billion miles from the parent stars and predicted to be hurtling into interstellar space at speeds up to 20,000 miles per hour (10 kilometers per second) -- destined to forever drift among the Milky Way's starry population.

Answer #% % filename Document4 page% % page 2 of% % numpages 2 % % date \@ "MMMM d, yyyy"June 18, 1998