Episode Details

Astronomers have finally spotted the dimmest planet ever directly imaged— a cold gas giant orbiting a baby star— and two teams stumbled upon it independently, using different telescopes and even old data. Found near Beta Pictoris, a mere 20 million-year-old star system, the planet is slightly bigger than Jupiter and takes 91 years to orbit. Its discovery, made possible by NASA’s Webb and the Very Large Telescope, offers a rare peek at how planets form and evolve in their earliest stages— a cosmic needle in a haystack that’s rewriting our understanding of planetary infancy.

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