Beta Pictoris (or just Beta Pic to its friends) is a fascinating star. It’s about 63 light-years away, so rather close in galactic terms, and has long been known to be an oddball. Even in the 1980s it was seen to be producing way too much infrared light—it’s a young star (about 23 million years old), part of a small group of relatively newly formed stars moving through space together. The extra infrared was likely due to dust and debris circling it, leftover from planetary formation, and warmed by the star.

In 1984 that disk was first seen, and it was a huge deal; the first time evidence of planetary formation was directly seen in an image. It’s been observed many times since, too.

Planets form from such disks, so could Beta Pic have planets? Yes! An exoplanet, Beta Pic b, was first announced in 2008, seen as a small dot near the star in images taken by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope. Turns out it was seen in images taken in 2003 as well, but missed because it was so faint and close to the star.

A second planet, Beta Pic c, was found in 2019. It wasn’t seen directly, but the effects of its gravity tugging on planet b were detected in data looking at planet b’s motion around the star. Planet c was seen in an image just a year later. 

And now a third planet has been found, and it’s a fun story: Two teams of astronomers independently discovered it nearly simultaneously!

One team was looking at data taken using the Very Large Telescope in Chile, and spotted the planet in their images [link to journal paper]. To confirm it, they then looked at publicly available archived JWST observations, and spotted the planet there, too; in fact it was in VLT data from 2014! This means the planet was actually visible much earlier, but astronomers just missed it. It’s faint, only about 1% as bright as planet b, so it’s no surprise no one noticed it. The images are noisy, and it’s easy to mistake a planet for some random blob of light. 

The second team did the opposite, kinda: they were observing Beta Pic with JWST and saw the planet in their data. They then followed up with more observations to confirm it [link to journal paper]. Both teams acknowledge the other in their papers, which is nice. The work of the two teams complement each other in some ways.

Beta Pic d, like its siblings, is a gas giant, a big planet like Jupiter, though more massive — the first team find it’s about 2.4 times as massive, the second about 2 – 4, so that’s consistent.

It orbits the star at a distance of about four billion kilometers, which corresponds to between the orbits of Uranus and Neptune around the sun. Despite that, it’s hot, about 325°C (620°F). This is because it’s young. Planets form as material in the disk around the star clumps up, collecting together to grow. Eventually this protoplanet gets enough gravity to actively draw material in, and as its gravity strengthens the material impacts at higher velocity. Imagine a planet getting hit by a dinosaur-killer asteroid every five minutes for 10 million years and you can see why these young planets are hot.

Planet d takes roughly 90 years to orbit the star once, which is enough to detect that motion directly in the images, since the first were taken in 2014 and the most recent just last year in 2025.

In the VLT images the bright star is subtracted during processing; in the JWST images it’s placed behind a small disk in the telescope to block its light. Those images are all to the same scale, and the planet is arrowed. The most recent image is at the upper left, and the oldest to the lower right. The motion is obvious enough (the bright blob in the top images above and to the left of the star is planet b).

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