A composite image of the blurry red ball, believed to be a planet outside the solar system, with the failed star. (Reuters)

Washington, Sept. 14 (Reuters): The image of a blurry red ball near a failed star just might be the first picture ever snapped of a planet outside our solar system, an astronomer who helped find the object said.

If it is a planet, it is probably a gas giant like Jupiter, said Ben Zuckerman of the University of California, Los Angeles, part of an international team of scientists that located the object.

Close by cosmic standards, the object known as a Giant Planet Candidate Companion is some 230 light-years away from Earth.

A light-year is about 10 trillion km, the distance light travels in a year.

Scientists have detected more than 100 of these so-called exoplanets, but have never directly observed them. Until now, they have confirmed these planets? existence by a characteristic wobble they cause in the stars they orbit.

Other teams have captured images of what they initially believed were so-called exoplanets ? objects orbiting stars other than our sun ? but they later proved to be brown dwarfs, stars without the mass to sustain nuclear fusion at their cores.

This one, Zuckerman said by telephone, is a very likely planetary candidate.

?The reason why we?re are reasonably confident that this is the real McCoy (the genuine article) is the colour of the candidate planet. It is very red,? Zuckerman said. This colour indicates a body too cool to be even a failed star, he said.

Still, the new putative planet is probably far too hot to be hospitable to Earth-type life. It?s about twice as hot as the planet Venus, which is some 42 million km closer to the sun than Earth is.

Its mass is about five times that of Jupiter, the largest planet in our system. Instead of orbiting a star, the object is close to a brown dwarf, the first time a possible planet has been spotted around this kind of failed star.

The brown dwarf is known as 2M1207 and is located in the TW Hydrae Association, in the direction of the constellation Hydra (The Water Snake) in the southern sky. Astronomers used one of the giant telescopes at the European Southern Observatory in northern Chile to spot it.

Zuckerman said scientists should know within a year whether their discovery is in fact a planet, as they watch the object?s movement in relation to the brown dwarf.