Image
© ESO/A-M Lagrange et al.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.
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, France.

The suspected planet was identified in 2008 around the star Beta Pictoris by a team at Grenoble Observatory in France using images taken by the Very Large Telescope in Chile. The object's orbit was estimated to be about eight times the diameter of Earth's.

Its orbit would have placed it in the right spot to explain the dip in Beta Pictoris's brightness recorded on 10 November 1981 by the Geneva Observatory in Switzerland (Astronomy & Astrophysics, DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/200811528).