Astrophys. J. 720, L82–L87 (2010)

Scientists have directly imaged a brown dwarf — an object too big to be a planet yet not massive enough to ignite into a star — travelling in a highly eccentric orbit around its parent star. At its closest approach the companion is within 9 astronomical units of the star, a distance similar to that between Saturn and the Sun, whereas its furthest reach is double that distance.

Beth Biller at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu and her colleagues used the Near-Infrared Coronagraphic Imager (NICI) to minimize the light of the glaring star and to spot the companion, which has a mass about 36 times that of Jupiter. Because the star is so young (around 12 million years old, compared with 4.5 billion for the Sun) the discovery helps to set constraints on our understanding of how brown dwarfs and planets formed.