In a remarkable double discovery, two separate teams of astronomers have simultaneously confirmed the existence of the faintest exoplanet ever directly imaged from Earth — a world that had been hiding in telescope data for more than a decade.
The planet, designated Beta Pictoris d, orbits a well-studied star called Beta Pictoris, located 63 light-years away in the southern constellation Pictor. The system is one of the most closely watched in astronomy, and scientists had long suspected it contained a third planet to explain some puzzling features in the disk of debris surrounding the star. They just hadn't been able to find it — until now.
Both discoveries happened independently within five days of each other in late 2025. The first team, led by Jean-Baptiste Ruffio at the University of California, San Diego, spotted an unexpectedly bright speck in images from the James Webb Space Telescope. What really caught their attention was not the speck itself but the spectrum that came with it — instead of a smooth pattern indicating dust, the data showed unmistakable peaks and troughs of carbon monoxide, a molecule found in the atmospheres of giant planets.
"We were able to quickly confirm our suspicions," said Ruffio.
Just five days later, a second team using the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile noticed the same strange signal. "Normally, when you see things like that, you work on the data some more, and these little scrappy signals go away," said Ben Sutlieff of the University of Edinburgh. "They're not real; they're noise and they vanish." This time, they didn't.
Both groups published their independent findings simultaneously on July 15, 2026, in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Beta Pictoris d is a gas giant with a mass of roughly 2.4 times that of Jupiter, orbiting its host star at a distance comparable to Neptune's distance from our Sun. One full year on Beta Pictoris d lasts about 91 Earth years. Its atmosphere contains water vapor, methane, and carbon monoxide — molecules commonly found in the skies of large gas planets.
What makes the discovery so striking is how long the planet evaded detection. After confirming the signal, Sutlieff's team searched through archival telescope images going back more than 11 years and found that Beta Pictoris d had actually appeared in old data, completely overlooked until now. "Planet d, it seems, has been playing a game of hide-and-seek with us for over a decade," said Jayne Birkby, a co-author of the Very Large Telescope study and an astronomer at the University of Oxford.
The discovery is notable not only for its drama but for its rarity. Of the more than 6,000 confirmed exoplanets known today, fewer than 100 have been identified through direct imaging. Most planets are detected indirectly, by the tiny dimming of starlight as they pass in front of their host star. Beta Pictoris d, some 100 times dimmer than its neighbour Beta Pictoris b, is the faintest planet ever directly captured from the ground.
"We've now built a picture of this planet," Sutlieff told the Associated Press, "and we are very excited to see what more can be learned about it." The finding confirms theories about a third world in the Beta Pictoris system and opens a new chapter in the exploration of one of astronomy's most closely studied stellar neighbourhoods.
