Astronomers have discovered a faint new planet that has been hidden from view for more than ten years.
The planet was seen orbiting a young star called Beta Pictoris, 63 light-years away from Earth.
It is one of three cold gas planets to be found around the star. However, it was not previously spotted due to being 100 times fainter than the others.
Unusually, two teams of scientists, one German and Scottish-led, and a California team, discovered the planet a few days apart, late last year.
It was only while observing the brighter planets that they caught sight of it for the first time.
“It was very much playing hide-and-seek for 11 years,” said the European Southern Observatory’s Markus Bonse, co-leader of the German and Scottish team who were first to discover the planet.
A second sighting through NASA’s Webb Space Telescope, which is the biggest and most powerful telescope to ever be launched into space, confirmed the planet’s existence.
“We’ve now built a picture of this planet…and we are very excited to see what more can be learned about it,” Ben Sutlieff, an astronomer at the University of Edinburgh, said.
Their findings were published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters on Wednesday.
Slightly bigger than Jupiter, the new planet takes 91 years to orbit its star.
It was born into a star system around 20 million years old, a baby compared to the Sun’s 4.5 billion years.
“Smaller terrestrial planets could still be forming,” said astronomer Aidan Gibbs from the University of California, San Diego, who led the California team that used the NASA telescope.
He said the planet system is “still in the process of stabilising” from hurtling asteroids and comets.
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Planets that orbit around stars outside our solar system are called exoplanets.
There are 6,000 confirmed exoplanets, and less than 100 of these have been detected through direct imaging, NASA said.
They are mostly sighted while passing in front of their star, making it appear dimmer.
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