Found You! Astronomers Spot the Faintest Exoplanet Ever Imaged From Earth After a Decade of Hide-and-Seek
Featured image: ESO/SPHERE composite image of Beta Pictoris system showing the debris disk and three exoplanets; credit: ESO/SPHERE collaboration
Astronomers have finally won a decade-long game of cosmic hide-and-seek, spotting the faintest exoplanet ever directly imaged from Earth after it spent 11 years hiding in plain sight within archival telescope data.
The planet, designated Beta Pictoris d, orbits the young star Beta Pictoris about 63 light-years away. At just 2.4 times the mass of Jupiter and 100 times fainter than its famous sibling Beta Pictoris b, it set a new record for the faintest exoplanet ever directly imaged from a ground-based telescope. Two independent research teams confirmed the discovery using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile and NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, with both papers published simultaneously July 15 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
A Serendipitous Discovery
The detection was almost accidental. Ben Sutlieff, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Edinburgh, was studying Beta Pictoris b’s atmosphere using the ERIS instrument on the VLT in December 2025 when he noticed a tiny extra speck in the mid-infrared images. He initially thought it was noise.
“I would not be at all surprised if there are rocky planets in Beta Pictoris,” Sutlieff told reporters. “With ELT, the Giant Magellan Telescope, maybe we’re going to be able to start detecting those as well!”
Markus Bonse of ESO applied machine learning techniques to clean up the image, and the speck persisted. “There’s something else there, did you see it?” Bonse recalled asking his colleague. What followed was an 11-year detective hunt through astronomical archives.
The team found that Beta Pictoris d had been captured in VLT/SPHERE data going back to 2014, and even in JWST/NIRCam observations. In one 2014 epoch, the planet was barely visible against the glare of its larger neighbor. Astrometric measurements over the full 11-year baseline confirmed it was gravitationally bound and moving in orbit, not a background star.
“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!'” said Jayne Birkby of the University of Oxford.
A System of Giants
Beta Pictoris is already famous among exoplanet hunters. The system hosts Beta Pictoris b, a roughly 10-Jupiter-mass planet on a 22-year orbit at 9.8 AU, and Beta Pictoris c, a similar-mass planet in a tight 3.3-year orbit. Now the system adds a third directly imaged planet.
Beta Pictoris d orbits at 26 AU (roughly the distance of Neptune from the Sun) with a 91-year orbital period. It is a relatively cool gas giant at around 600 Kelvin, with an atmosphere rich in carbon dioxide, water, and methane. Critically, its orbit explains the inner edge of Beta Pictoris’s famous debris disk at 30 to 50 AU, solving a puzzle the system had presented for years.
An independent team led by Aidan Gibbs of the University of California used JWST’s NIRSpec and MIRI instruments to confirm the planet simultaneously, finding its CO2-rich atmosphere independently.
With three directly imaged planets, Beta Pictoris becomes only the second multi-planet system ever directly imaged: after HR 8799. These systems are scientific gold mines because they let astronomers study multiple planets formed from the same material but at different locations and masses.
“Systems with multiple directly imaged exoplanets are the ‘holy grails’ of discoveries,” Sutlieff said, “because they can teach us a lot about what different exoplanets are like in the same formation environment.”
A Ground-Based Triumph
Fewer than 100 of the more than 6,000 confirmed exoplanets have ever been directly imaged. Doing so from a ground-based telescope, looking through Earth’s turbulent atmosphere, is extraordinarily difficult. The detection demonstrates that ground-based observatories like the VLT can compete with space telescopes for the faintest exoplanet detections, at a fraction of the cost.
“The new planet is 100 times fainter than Beta Pictoris b, the famous planet in the same system, making it the faintest exoplanet ever imaged directly from Earth,” said Bonse.
Treasures Still in the Archives
Perhaps the most exciting implication is that Beta Pictoris d was hiding in archival data the entire time. Valentina Christiaens of CEA Paris-Saclay noted: “The detections in the archival SPHERE data are not only very exciting on their own, but also because they suggest a number of treasures are still hidden in the archives of VLT instruments!”
With next-generation Extremely Large Telescopes (ELT, GMT) coming online in the next few years, astronomers expect many more such hidden worlds to emerge. As John Monnier of the University of Michigan put it: “Basically, this is just a little bit of an appetizer. We think the ELTs are going to find just a huge number more of these objects.”
Beth Biller of the University of Edinburgh echoed the sentiment: “Planets seem to have friends. Many of the famous directly imaged exoplanet systems seem to have multiple giant planets in the same system, and likely there are even more lower-mass planets hiding in these systems that might be revealed with instruments on the ELT.”
The discovery paper, authored by Sutlieff, Bonse, and more than 90 co-authors, is published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters (DOI: 10.3847/2041-8213/ae80a0, arXiv: 2606.23801).