A possible planet orbiting Beta Pic?

Hot on the tail of the exciting exoplanet images produced with the Gemini, Keck and Hubble telescopes, a team of French scientists have spotted a possible planetary companion to Beta Pictoris. This star bears a remarkable resemblance to the parent stars of last week’s exoplanet hosts, HR8799 and Fomalhaut – it is a very young A-type star surrounded by a marked dusty debris disk. In fact, in 1984 Beta Pic was the first star to have its debris disk imaged optically, using the 2.5 m du Pont telescope at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile.

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