Overview
- A James Webb Space Telescope team led by Aidan Gibbs found the new planet while observing Beta Pictoris b on Thursday by spotting carbon monoxide, water and methane lines in NIRSpec integral-field data.
- An independent VLT team led by Ben Sutlieff and Markus Bonse recovered the source in new ERIS images and traced it through VLT/SPHERE and Webb/NIRCam archival frames spanning about 11 years to show common motion with the star.
- Combined analyses place Beta Pictoris d at roughly 2–4 Jupiter masses, a temperature near 600 K and an orbital radius around 26–30 astronomical units, with a preliminary ground-based fit suggesting a long period near 91 years.
- This is the first directly imaged exoplanet found primarily by moderate-resolution spectral template matching, showing that spectroscopy can pick out planetary atmospheres where dust-scattered starlight hides faint point sources.
- Teams say follow-up imaging and spectroscopy over a longer observing arc are needed to pin down the orbit and composition, and that the planet may explain the debris disk’s sharp inner edge while offering a new laboratory for studying young giant planets.