Astronomers have identified a third planet orbiting Beta Pictoris, a star 63 light-years away in the constellation Pictor, uncovering what is described as the dimmest exoplanet ever directly imaged from Earth.
The gas giant, designated Beta Pictoris d, is roughly 2.4 times the mass of Jupiter and takes 91 years to complete an orbit. It is approximately 100 times fainter than Beta Pictoris b, the first planet found in the system, and has a wider, colder orbit than its two sibling planets.
Two teams made the discovery independently, one using the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile and the other using NASA's James Webb Space Telescope. The VLT team confirmed the find in archival data spanning more than a decade. Both teams published their findings in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.