Free Astronomy Magazine September-October 2026

33 SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2026 ASTRO PUBLISHING P revious page: Beta Pictoris is lo- cated about 60 light-years away towards the constellation of Pic- tor’(the Painter's Easel) and is one of the best-known examples of a star surrounded by a dusty debris disc. This image, based on data from the Digitized Sky Survey 2, shows a region of approximately 1.7 x 2.3 degrees around Beta Pic- toris. [ESO/Digitized Sky Survey 2] T his image, taken with ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) shows Beta Pictoris d, a new planet found orbit- ing the star Beta Pictoris. The star is at the centre of the frame, and was subtracted when processing the data, revealing the environment around it. The new planet, indicated with an arrow, is the third one found around this star. The other two are Beta Pic- toris b –– the bright source to the left, and Beta Pictoris c, orbiting much closer to the star and not seen here. The image was taken with the ERIS instrument at the VLT. Based on its infrared brightness and colour, the new planet appears to be a gas giant, about 2.4 times more massive than Jupiter. The diffuse horizontal band in this image is a debris disc around the star, seen here edge-on, the left- over material of planetary formation. [ESO/B. Sutlieff, M. Bonse et al.] back as far as 11 years ago, includ- ing one where it was only just visi- ble against the glare of its larger neighbour 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 as- tronomer at the University of Ox- ford, 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 the planets Beta Pictoris b and Beta Pictoris c. More- over, while the first two planets are each around ten times the mass of Jupiter, the new planet is only 2.4 times more massive than Jupiter, making it one of the lightest ever A team of astronomers have discovered a third planet or- biting 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 to be imaged from the ground. After spotting the planet using the Euro- pean Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT), the team found it had been hiding in archive observations spanning more than a decade. “This was a serendipitous discov- ery,” says Ben Sutlieff, co-lead of the study published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters and 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. How- ever, when the team went to analyse their images of the system, they noticed something else, sepa- rated from Beta Pictoris b, that led them down an entirely new path. “There’s something else there, did you see it?” Markus Bonse, ESO as- tronomer in Germany and the other co-lead of the study, recalls saying when looking at the data. To con- firm the nature of their detection, the team looked through the ESO archive, a catalogue of past obser- vations made with ESO facilities. They found a new planet, Beta Pic- toris d, in multiple images dating