Overview
- The discovery, reported Wednesday, July 15, 2026, was confirmed by two independent teams that detected the object days apart using ESO’s Very Large Telescope and NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope.
- Beta Pictoris d is a young gas giant about 2.4 times the mass of Jupiter on an roughly 91-year orbit around the 20-million-year-old star Beta Pictoris located about 63 light-years away.
- Researchers validated the detection by finding the faint source in roughly 11 years of archival VLT and JWST images, which showed the object moving with the star rather than as a background source.
- The planet is the faintest ever directly imaged from Earth, roughly 100 times dimmer than Beta Pictoris b, a result made possible by advanced image-processing and machine-learning techniques that preserved the weak signal.
- Teams plan follow-up characterization now and scientists say the finding both highlights cheaper ground-based search strategies and boosts expectations that next-generation extremely large telescopes will reveal many similar low-luminosity planets.