Astronomers Spot Dimmest Exoplanet Ever Directly Imaged Around Young Star

Across the southern sky, a star barely 20 million years old has quietly harbored a secret: a gas giant so faint it spent more than a decade hiding in plain sight, undetected among the glare of its brighter siblings. Two independent teams of astronomers, working in deliberate isolation from one another, converged on the same discovery within days last year — one using a ground-based telescope in Chile, the other the James Webb Space Telescope in orbit. Their simultaneous arrival at the same truth, announced this week in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, is both a testament to the maturation of