CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla.\u00a0\u2014\u00a0Astronomers have discovered a faint, elusive planet orbiting a young star after more than a decade of cosmic hide-and-seek.<\/p>\n
In an unusual twist, two groups working independently detected the cold gas giant a few days apart late last year using different telescopes. It\u2019s the dimmest planet ever directly imaged from Earth, scientists reported.<\/p>\n
A Scottish and German-led team spied the new planet around the star Beta Pictoris using the European Southern Observatory\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was very much playing hide-and-seek for 11 years,\u201d said the European Southern Observatory\u2019s Markus Bonse, co-leader of the first team.<\/p>\n
The California-led team made the discovery with NASA\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
The find was serendipitous. Each team was studying one of the star\u2019s already identified planets when they spotted a less massive one \u2014 100 times fainter \u2014 lurking farther out. They deliberately kept their work from one another so as not to bias the results.<\/p>\n
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 that\u2019s barely 20 million years old \u2014 a kid compared with the sun\u2019s 4.5-billion-year-old neighborhood \u2014 the planet is probably similar to a much younger Jupiter, said UC San Diego\u2019s Aidan Gibbs, who led the second team.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe giant planets have formed, but smaller terrestrial planets could still be forming,\u201d Gibbs said in an email. Beta Pictoris \u201cis probably our best look at a planetary system just after it has formed and is still in the process of stabilizing\u201d from hurtling asteroids and comets.<\/p>\n
Beta Pictoris is located in the easel-shaped southern constellation Pictor and is 63 light-years from Earth. A light-year is nearly 6 trillion miles.<\/p>\n
Fewer than 100 of the more than 6,000 confirmed exoplanets \u2014 planets around other stars \u2014 have been detected through direct imaging, according to NASA. Most were found while passing in front of their star, briefly dimming it. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve now built a picture of this planet,\u201d the University of Edinburgh\u2019s Ben Sutlieff said in an email, \u201cand we are very excited to see what more can be learned about it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Dunn writes for the Associated Press. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla.\u00a0\u2014\u00a0Astronomers have discovered a faint, elusive planet orbiting a young star after more than a decade…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":560914,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[237061,191925,2711,3224,39911,237058,40263,61,60,26238,92510,91,23190,82,237059,9791,102221,237060],"class_list":["post-560913","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-aidan-gibbs","tag-bright-star","tag-decade","tag-earth","tag-european-southern-observatory","tag-faint-new-planet","tag-hiding","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-last-year","tag-light-year","tag-nasa","tag-planet","tag-science","tag-star-beta-pictoris","tag-team","tag-webb-space-telescope","tag-young-star"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/560913","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=560913"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/560913\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/560914"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=560913"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=560913"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=560913"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}