CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — After an 11-year game of celestial hide-and-seek, astronomers have identified a dim and difficult-to-detect planet circling a young star.
The cold gas giant was spotted in a rare double discovery: two independent research teams found it just days apart late last year, each using a different telescope. Scientists said Wednesday it is the faintest planet ever directly imaged from Earth.
One team, led by researchers in Scotland and Germany, detected the planet around Beta Pictoris with the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile. The scientists then combed through years of archived observations to verify its orbit. The world had been sitting unnoticed in the data, washed out by the glare of its much brighter host star and two previously known companion planets.
“It was very much playing hide-and-seek for 11 years,” said Markus Bonse of the European Southern Observatory, who co-led the first team.
A second team, led by researchers in California, found the planet using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. With Webb — the largest and most powerful telescope ever sent into space — only two observations were needed. Both teams published their results in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
The discovery happened by chance. Each group had been examining one of Beta Pictoris’ already known planets when a less massive world, about 100 times fainter, appeared farther from the star. To avoid influencing one another’s conclusions, the teams intentionally kept their analyses separate.
The newly found planet is slightly larger than Jupiter and completes one trip around its star every 91 years, a bit longer than Uranus takes to orbit the sun. Because the Beta Pictoris system is only about 20 million years old — remarkably young compared with our 4.5 billion-year-old solar system — the planet may resemble a much younger version of Jupiter, said Aidan Gibbs of the University of California San Diego, who led the second team.
“The giant planets have formed, but smaller terrestrial planets could still be forming,” Gibbs said in an email. Beta Pictoris “is probably our best look at a planetary system just after it has formed and is still in the process of stabilizing” amid swarms of asteroids and comets.
Beta Pictoris is located in the easel-shaped southern constellation Pictor, or painter, and 63 light-years from Earth. A light-year is nearly 6 trillion miles (more than 9 trillion kilometers).
Fewer than 100 of the more than 6,000 confirmed exoplanets — planets around other stars — have been detected through direct imaging, according to NASA. Most were found while passing in front of their star, briefly dimming it.
“We’ve now built a picture of this planet,” the University of Edinburgh’s Ben Sutlieff said in an email, “and we are very excited to see what more can be learned about it.”
