A team of astronomers has discovered a third planet orbiting the star Beta Pictoris. The new planet, Beta Pictoris d, is 100 times fainter than Beta Pictoris b—the first planet discovered in the same system—and is among the lightest exoplanets ever imaged from the ground. After spotting the planet using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT), the team found it had been hiding in archival observations spanning more than a decade.
“This was a serendipitous discovery,” says Ben Sutlieff, co-lead of the study published today in The Astrophysical Journal Letters and an astronomer at the University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom. “We initially wanted to look more at a known planet in the system, Beta Pictoris b, to see how it changed over time,” he adds. However, when the team analyzed images of the system, they noticed something else, separated from Beta Pictoris b, that led them down an entirely new path.
“There’s something else there, did you see it?” Markus Bonse, an ESO astronomer in Germany and the other co-lead of the study, recalls saying while looking at the data. To confirm the nature of their detection, the team looked through the ESO archive, a catalog of past observations made with ESO facilities. They found a new planet, Beta Pictoris d, in multiple images dating back as far as 11 years ago, including one where it was only just visible against the glare of its larger neighbor, Beta Pictoris b. “Planet d, it seems, has been playing a game of hide-and-seek with us for over a decade, and only now can we say ‘found you,'” says Jayne Birkby, co-author of the study and an astronomer at the University of Oxford, United Kingdom.
The newly discovered planet, like the two others in the system, is a gas giant like Jupiter or Saturn. However, Beta Pictoris d has a much wider orbit than Beta Pictoris b and Beta Pictoris c. Moreover, while the first two planets are each around 10 times the mass of Jupiter, the new planet is only 2.4 times as massive as Jupiter, making it one of the lightest ever imaged from the ground. The planet is also relatively cold and, hence, extremely faint relative to its host star.
Direct imaging, in which the light from an object is captured as in a photograph, works only for planets bright enough to show up next to their much brighter host stars. Taking a direct image of a planet as faint as Beta Pictoris d, therefore, represents a significant achievement. “The new planet is 100 times fainter than Beta Pictoris b, the famous planet in the same system, making it the faintest exoplanet ever imaged directly from Earth,” explains Bonse.
This first clear detection of Beta Pictoris d, which is 63 light-years away from us, was made with the ERIS instrument on the VLT by Sutlieff, Bonse and their team. An independent team led by Aidan Gibbs at the University of California also discovered the same planet using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), a facility of the U.S., European and Canadian space agencies. Their results are also published today in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
To confirm a planet’s discovery from a detection, astronomers usually have to make follow-up observations. However, this system had been extensively studied, with several images stored in the ESO and JWST science archives.
“To our joy, out it popped in previous SPHERE observations,” says Birkby, referring to another VLT instrument previously used to observe the Beta Pictoris system. The planet was also spotted in archival observations from NIRCam, a JWST instrument. Now that the team knew where to look for the potential new planet, “it turns out it was hiding in the data all along,” says Birkby. Co-author Valentin Christiaens, a researcher at CEA Paris-Saclay, France, adds, “The detections in the archival SPHERE data are not only very exciting on their own, but also because they suggest a number of treasures are still hidden in the archives of VLT instruments.”
Beta Pictoris is now the second system, after HR 8799, where more than two planets have been directly imaged. “Systems with multiple directly imaged exoplanets are the ‘holy grails’ of discoveries, because they can teach us a lot about what different exoplanets are like in the same formation environment,” says Sutlieff. Beta Pictoris d also clears up a mystery in its planetary system, as it has exactly the right mass and position to explain the particular shape of the surrounding debris disk, made of the leftovers of planet formation.
The discovery of Beta Pictoris d in this way encourages further direct imaging of planetary systems where faint planets may have been hiding in plain sight, including with ESO’s upcoming Extremely Large Telescope (ELT). “Planets seem to have friends,” says Beth Biller, also a co-author of the paper and an astronomer at the University of Edinburgh. “Many of the famous directly imaged exoplanet systems seem to have multiple giant planets in the same system, and likely there are even more lower-mass planets hiding in these systems that might be revealed with instruments on the ELT.”
Publication details
Direct Imaging Discovery of Giant Exoplanet β Pictoris d: A Decade-Long Game of Hide-and-Seek, The Astrophysical Journal Letters (2026). DOI: 10.3847/2041-8213/ae80a0
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Faintest planet ever imaged from Earth found after more than 10 years of hide-and-seek (2026, July 15)
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