NASA's Webb Captures A Hidden Planet That Fooled Astronomers For Years

Astronomers have uncovered one of our cosmic neighborhood's most famous star systems, revealing a third planet that has evaded discovery for more than a decade. The newly-discovered world, Beta Pictoris d, resides 63 light-years away in the southern constellation of Pictor. Its discovery lifts Beta Pictoris to a rare status: it is now only the second planetary system known to host three or more directly imaged exoplanets.

Not that scientists were looking for it in the first place: this breakthrough was both an accidental discovery and a triumph of parallel science. Late last year, two independent research teams set out to study the young, 20-million-year-old star’s existing planetary family. A team led by astronomers at the University of Edinburgh and the European Southern Observatory (ESO) targeted the system using the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile. Meanwhile, a California-led team pointed NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) toward the...

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