HONOLULU -- Scientists on Thursday released images captured by Keck and Gemini North telescopes on Mauna Kea for the first time of planets orbiting a sun like our solar system.

The solar system is 140 light years away and includes four planets, according to two studies released on Thursday. Scientists said there may be more planets circling the sun that they have not found yet.

American and British researchers used the observatories on Mauna Kea to find three planets circling a sun about 1.5 times the size of our own.

"Every extrasolar planet detected so far has been a wobble on a graph. These are the first pictures of an entire system," Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory astrophysicist Bruce Macintosh said in a written statement. "We've been trying to image planets for eight years with no luck and now we have pictures of three planets at once."

NASA then used the Hubble Space Telescope to find a fourth planet.

"But we finally have an actual image of an entire system," Macintosh said. "This is a milestone in the search and characterization of planetary systems around stars."

In the past decade, scientists used Doppler to track the wobble of the planets created by the gravitational pull from stars.

"Seeing these planets directly -- separating their light from the star -- lets us study them as individuals, and use spectroscopy to study their properties, like temperature or composition," Macintosh said.

The new solar system was found in the Pegasus Constellation.

Read expanded coverage in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin.