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The James Webb Space Telescope has discovered a previously hidden planet in the well-known Beta Pictoris system, but despite the excitement surrounding the announcement, the newly identified world is almost certainly not a second Earth. Named Beta Pictoris d, the planet lies about 63 light-years away and orbits a young star surrounded by one of the brightest disks of dust and debris known to astronomers. Researchers were not originally searching for another planet.<\/p>\n
They were using Webb\u2019s Near-Infrared Spectrograph, or NIRSpec, to examine the atmosphere of Beta Pictoris b, one of two giant planets already known in the system, when an unexpected chemical pattern appeared in the data. The signal contained a distinctive series of carbon monoxide absorption lines\u2014effectively a molecular barcode\u2014coming from a location where scientists had expected only light scattered by dust.<\/p>\n
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By combining that spectrum with measurements of the source\u2019s motion and position, the team showed that it was orbiting Beta Pictoris and was not a background star, instrument artifact, or brown dwarf. Follow-up observations detected water vapor and methane, further confirming that the source was a planet with a substantial atmosphere. Beta Pictoris d is estimated to possess at least twice Jupiter\u2019s mass and to circle its star at approximately 30 astronomical units, roughly comparable to Neptune\u2019s distance from the Sun. It is the third giant planet found in the system and the widest-orbiting of the three, although it remains inside the inner edge of the surrounding debris disk.<\/p>\n