Free Astronomy Magazine September-October 2026

34 SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2026 ASTRO PUBLISHING T his series of images shows observations of the exoplanet Beta Pictoris d over more than a decade. This planet was first discovered using the ERIS instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT). Astronomers were then able to find it in archival data taken with the SPHERE instrument, also at the VLT, and the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope. The new planet, marked with an arrow, is the third planet discovered around the star Beta Pictoris. The other two planets are Beta Pictoris b ––the brighter spot seen in the top three images–– and Beta Pictoris c, not seen here as it orbits much closer to the star. The star itself is not visible here: in the ERIS image it was subtracted when processing the data, whereas in the JWST and SPHERE images it was blocked with a special mask. As time goes by the planets orbit around the star, and their position on these images changes. In the 2014 observations, planets d and b appeared almost exactly aligned as seen from Earth. It was only after removing the light of planet b that the much fainter planet d could be seen. The diffuse diagonal band in these images is a debris disc around the star, seen here edge-on, the leftover material of planetary formation. [ESO/B. Sutlieff, M. Bonse et al.] imaged from the ground. The plan- et is also relatively cold and, hence, extremely faint relative to its host star. Direct imaging, where the light from an object is captured as in a photograph, only works for planets bright enough to show up next to their much brighter host stars. Tak- ing a direct image of a planet as faint as Beta Pictoris d, therefore, represents a significant achieve- ment. “The new planet is 100 times fainter than Beta Pictoris b, the fa- mous planet in the same system, making it the faintest exoplanet ever imaged directly from Earth,” explains Bonse. This first clear de- tection of Beta Pictoris d, which is 63 light-years away from us, was made with the ERIS instrument on the VLT by Sutlieff, Bonse and their team. An independent team led by Aidan Gibbs at the University of California, US, also discovered the