A Planet Playing Hide-and-Seek for Ten Whole Years
The News
Astronomers finally spotted a planet called Beta Pictoris d after searching for over a decade — it was hiding in the bright glare of its star the whole time. Two teams found it just days apart using NASA's James Webb Space Telescope and Chile's Very Large Telescope, and it's the faintest planet ever directly photographed from Earth: about 100 times dimmer than its bright sibling planet next door.
Professor Pip's little brass telescope was still warm from the twilight sky when he tumbled through the observatory door, spectacles slipping down his nose.
"Oh my whiskers, look what took me ten years to see!" he laughed, pat-pat-patting the pockets of his green lab coat. Out came a small glowing marble, no bigger than a blueberry, and a big brass lantern that he lit with a soft PSH.
Mia, Leo, and Beatrix crowded in from the rug, tails of curiosity practically twitching.
"Today," Pip announced, "we're finding a planet that was very good at hide-and-seek."
"How can a whole planet hide?" said Beatrix.
"Precisely the question!" Pip set the bright lantern in the middle of the workbench. Then he placed the tiny glowing marble right next to it. "Look at the marble. Can you see it?"
The children squinted. The lantern was so bright it almost hurt. The little marble was completely lost in its glow.
"It's gone!" said Leo.
"Not gone," said Pip, waggling a paw. "Hiding. Watch." He held up his other paw and blocked the lantern from view — and just like that, the little marble reappeared, soft and dim. Every child gasped.
"Ooooh! It was there the whole time!"
"That is called glare," Pip said, tail swishing. "Bright light next to something dim can hide the dim thing completely. And when astronomers try to photograph a planet, its star is gazillions of times brighter than the planet. When they finally take a picture of a real planet next to its real star, we call that direct imaging."
He held up an imaginary telescope. "The new planet, called Beta Pictoris d, is 63 light-years away. Two teams of astronomers spent eleven years studying its bright star, and this dim little world was tucked right in the star's glare the whole time. Then — with clever cameras and a huge telescope up on a mountain in Chile, and NASA's James Webb telescope out in space — they finally blocked out just enough starlight and there it was! One team called it 'cosmic hide-and-seek.'"
"Like trying to see a firefly next to a flashlight!" said Mia.
"Exactly right!" beamed Pip. He looked up through the arched window, where the very first stars were starting to prick through the sky. "Somewhere out there, thousands more planets are hiding behind their stars' glare, waiting for us to look just a little more carefully."
He pressed the little marble into Leo's paws. "Now I wonder how many things right here on Earth are hiding in plain sight, just because we haven't blocked out the glare yet."
Spark a Conversation
- If you were a scientist trying to photograph a firefly next to a flashlight, what would you do?
- Have you ever missed something because there was too much bright light around it?
- Why do you think two different teams of scientists were looking at the same star at the same time?