While discoveries of exoplanets are commonplace these days, the most obvious detection method — directly taking a picture of a planet — remains one of the most challenging. And such images almost always reveal a single, giant planet orbiting far from its host star.
So researchers were pleasantly surprised to turn up a second planet orbiting around PDS 70, a young star system about 370 light-years away from Earth. It’s only the second multi-planet system observed by direct imaging, and the image shows the star system still in formation, providing valuable evidence about how planetary systems form and evolve.
The first planet found in the system is called PDS 70 b, and it was discovered in 2018. It weighs between 4 and 17 times the mass of Jupiter, and orbits about as far away from its star as Uranus does from our own sun.
The new planet is named PDS ...
