New planet revealed around a young star after a decade in hiding

Astronomers have discovered a faint, elusive planet orbiting a young star after more than a decade of cosmic hide-and-seek. In an unusual twist, two groups working independently detected the cold gas giant a few days apart late last year using different telescopes. It’s the dimmest planet ever directly imaged from earth, scientists said.

A Scottish and German-led team spied the new planet around the star Beta Pictoris using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile, then dug through archives to confirm its orbit. The planet had remained hidden in the data all this time, overshadowed by its considerably brighter star and two companion planets.

Beta Pictoris is located in the easel-shaped southern constellation Pictor and 63 light-years from earth.

A California-led team made the discovery with NASA’s Webb Space Telescope. Two observations were all it took with Webb, the biggest and most powerful telescope ever launched into space. Both teams reported their findings in the Astrophysical Journal Letters on July 15.

Each team was studying one of the star’s already identified planets when they spotted a less massive one 100-times fainter lurking farther out. They deliberately kept their work from one another so as not to bias the results.

The new planet is slightly bigger than Jupiter and takes 91 years to orbit its star, a little longer than it takes Uranus to orbit our sun. Born into a star system barely 20 million years old, the planet is probably similar to a much younger Jupiter, said the University of California San Diego’s Aidan Gibbs, who led the second team.