The light from the star Beta Pictoris (which has been blocked out in this near-infrared image) is 1000 times brighter than the bluish-white dot left of centre, which may be a planet (Image: ESO/A-M Lagrange et al.)
DID we miss evidence of an alien world as early as 1981?
The first sighting of another solar system was announced in 1992, but a system found more recently may have shown its presence a decade earlier, when a mysterious blip in a star’s brightness was recorded. So says Alain Lecavelier des Etangs and Alfred Vidal-Madjar of the Institute of Astrophysics in Paris,…
