CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — After more than a decade of eluding detection, a faint and distant planet has finally been spotted orbiting a young star, and the discovery came from two separate research teams who didn’t even know the other was looking.
Both groups independently identified the cold gas giant within days of each other late last year, using entirely different telescopes. Scientists announced Wednesday that it holds the record as the dimmest planet ever captured through direct imaging from Earth.
A team led by Scottish and German researchers located the planet orbiting a star called Beta Pictoris, using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile. They then searched through years of archived data to verify the planet’s orbit. The planet had gone unnoticed all that time, hidden in the glare of its much brighter host star and two other planets already known to orbit it.
“It was very much playing hide-and-seek for 11 years,” said Markus Bonse of the European Southern Observatory, who co-led the first research team.
The second team, based out of California, spotted the same planet using NASA’s Webb Space Telescope — the largest and most powerful telescope ever sent into space. It only took two observations with Webb to confirm the find. Both teams published their results in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
The discovery was largely a matter of chance. Each team had been focusing on one of Beta Pictoris’s already-known planets when they noticed something else — a less massive object, 100 times dimmer, sitting farther out in the system. To avoid influencing each other’s conclusions, the two groups deliberately kept their work separate.
The newly found planet is slightly larger than Jupiter and completes one orbit around its star every 91 years — just a bit longer than it takes Uranus to circle our own sun. The star system it belongs to is only about 20 million years old, making it extremely young compared to our 4.5-billion-year-old solar neighborhood. The planet likely resembles a much younger version of Jupiter, according to Aidan Gibbs of the University of California San Diego, who headed the second research team.
“The giant planets have formed, but smaller terrestrial planets could still be forming,” Gibbs said. He added that Beta Pictoris “is probably our best look at a planetary system just after it has formed and is still in the process of stabilizing” from the chaos of flying asteroids and comets.
Beta Pictoris sits within the southern constellation Pictor — named after a painter’s easel — and lies 63 light-years away from Earth. To put that in perspective, a single light-year equals nearly 6 trillion miles, or more than 9 trillion kilometers.
According to NASA, fewer than 100 of the more than 6,000 confirmed exoplanets — planets orbiting stars other than our sun — have been found through direct imaging. The vast majority were detected by watching them pass in front of their host star, causing a brief dimming of its light.
“We’ve now built a picture of this planet,” said Ben Sutlieff of the University of Edinburgh. “And we are very excited to see what more can be learned about it.”
