James Webb Finds Hidden Third Planet in Beta Pictoris System

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has uncovered a previously hidden giant planet in the Beta Pictoris system, adding a third known world to one of astronomy’s most closely watched nearby star systems and highlighting a new way to find planets buried in dust.

NASA announced the discovery Wednesday, identifying the planet as Beta Pictoris d, or β Pic d. What makes the find stand out is not just the planet itself, but how Webb found it: mainly through the chemical signature of its atmosphere rather than as an obvious bright dot in a picture. The planet had remained concealed inside Beta Pictoris’ bright debris disk — a vast ring of dust and rocky leftovers — where scattered light can overwhelm standard imaging.

Instead, Webb picked up the planet in moderate-resolution spectra taken with its Near-Infrared Spectrograph, or NIRSpec, while researchers were studying another known planet in the system on Nov. 28, 2025. The signal appeared serendipitously, and follow-up Webb observations were taken in March 2026. The spectrum revealed atmospheric fingerprints of methane, carbon monoxide and water. The Webb team says this is the first directly imaged planet discovered primarily through moderate-resolution spectroscopy.

A second group independently detected the same planet using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile. That team, using the ERIS instrument, captured the planet in direct imaging on Dec. 3, 2025, and matched it to archival observations, helping show that the object is a bound planet rather than a background source. The two studies — one led by Aidan Gibbs, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, San Diego, and the other led by Ben J. Sutlieff of the University of Edinburgh and the European Southern Observatory — were accepted to The Astrophysical Journal Letters and posted on arXiv on June 22.

Beta Pictoris is a young A6V star about 64 light-years from Earth and roughly 23 million years old, making it young by stellar standards. The newly found planet appears to be a relatively low-mass gas giant. The Webb team estimated its mass at about 2 to 4 times that of Jupiter. The ground-based team put it at about 2.4 plus or minus 0.6 Jupiter masses and estimated its temperature at around 600 kelvins, or about 620 degrees Fahrenheit. Its exact path is still being refined, but researchers say it appears to orbit tens of astronomical units from the star. More observations will be needed to pin down its orbit, mass, temperature and atmospheric composition.

The system is already famous because it includes Beta Pictoris b, one of the earliest exoplanets ever directly imaged, and Beta Pictoris c, reported in 2019. With β Pic d, Beta Pictoris becomes only the second known planetary system with at least three directly imaged planets, after HR 8799.

The discovery also gives astronomers another clue to how the system is structured. The new planet’s likely mass and position are consistent with the idea that it may help shape or carve the inner edge of the debris disk, one of the brightest known around any star.

“This discovery adds another piece to an already fascinating planetary system,” Gibbs said in a NASA statement. He added that the team had not been searching for a new world at all: “We were trying to understand one we already knew existed. Then, this telltale signal appeared in the data where we didn’t expect it.”