ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT) at the Paranal Observatory in Chile captured the first-ever photo of multiple planets orbiting a Sun-like star (Credit: ESO/J. Girard / CC By-SA-4.0 Creativecommons.org)

While astronomers have discovered evidence of thousands of exoplanets, obtaining direct images of the distant worlds has always been a challenge. That's because the planets tend to huddle close to the star they orbit and often get concealed by their star's dazzling light. Of the handful of images captured, most are of a single planet orbiting a Sun-like star. The only two multi-planet systems photographed feature brown dwarfs, or "failed stars," which are radically different in nature from the Sun. Now, an international team of scientists may have finally captured a young, Sun-like star with two giant Jupiter and Saturn-like planets in orbit.