14 DAY TRIAL // Investigators discovered that an extrasolar planet in the Beta Pictoris star system was responsible for a warping they had detected in the star's debris ring. At first, the team believed that the crookedness may have occurred as a result of a second exoplanet being present, but the new study shows that is not the case.
Beta Pictoris b, the exoplanet is question, is about the size of Jupiter, and is the first object to be discovered inside the system, outside of the star itself. The fact that the protoplanetary ring surrounding the star was crooked was immediately apparent to astronomer as well.
This unusual setup is what led them to believe that another planet may be present as well, orbiting farther away from the parent star than its sibling. But astronomers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, did not find any indication that this was true, Space reports.
“The fact that there is a known planet with the mass and distance that it has, means it is not possible for another planet to be making the warp,” CfA graduate student Rebekah Dawson explains.