Star system, 64 light-years
Beta Pictoris and its three planets
bet Pic c is an exoplanet about 12.5 times Earth's width (a size estimated from its mass), about 1.1 times Jupiter's, 64 light-years away.
Beta Pictoris is a star of spectral type A6 V, 64 light-years from us, with three known planets. This page takes them one at a time.
Drawn at the system's own scale, every orbit from the Archive's numbers.
What is measured, what is computed, what is imagined.
measured The period, and where the table says so the width and the mass, by the method named in each section.
computed Anything marked computed: the size of an orbit where Kepler's third law corrects the table, the temperature of a bare ball at that distance, the starlight received, and the habitable zone.
imagined The picture is an artist's impression. Nobody has seen the surface of a planet of another star: its colour, clouds and land are not known, and the share picture says so in its corner.
The planets
bet Pic c
bet Pic c is an exoplanet about 12.5 times Earth's width (a size estimated from its mass), about 1.1 times Jupiter's, 64 light-years away.
- Width
- 12.5 × Earth's estimated
- Mass
- 2,765 times Earth's measured
- One year
- 1,202 days measured
- Distance from its star
- 2.7 au from the Archive
- Temperature of a bare ball there
- 268 K computed, not measured
- Starlight, against Earth's
- 1.23 × computed
It was found by the back-and-forth wobble its pull puts into its star's motion, seen as a shift in the colour of the star's light in 2019. No habitable zone is computed for its star (a pulsar, a binary or a star outside the formula's range), so none is claimed.
See bet Pic c in 3D · The picture is an artist's impression.
bet Pic b
bet Pic b is an exoplanet 18.495 times Earth's width, about 1.6 times Jupiter's, 64 light-years away.
- Width
- 18.495 × Earth's measured
- Mass
- 2,765 times Earth's measured
- One year
- 8,682 days measured
- Distance from its star
- 10.07 au from the Archive
- Temperature of a bare ball there
- 139 K computed, not measured
- Starlight, against Earth's
- 0.0885 × computed
It was photographed directly, a faint dot beside the glare of its star in 2008. No habitable zone is computed for its star (a pulsar, a binary or a star outside the formula's range), so none is claimed.
See bet Pic b in 3D · The picture is an artist's impression.
bet Pic d
bet Pic d is an exoplanet 14.123 times Earth's width, about 1.3 times Jupiter's, 64 light-years away.
- Width
- 14.123 × Earth's measured
- Mass
- 762.788 times Earth's measured
- One year
- 33,200 days measured
- Distance from its star
- 24.54 au computed from the period and the star's mass
- Temperature of a bare ball there
- 89 K computed, not measured
- Starlight, against Earth's
- 0.0149 × computed
It was photographed directly, a faint dot beside the glare of its star in 2026. No habitable zone is computed for its star (a pulsar, a binary or a star outside the formula's range), so none is claimed. The Archive's own distance for it is 26 au; the three papers behind its period, its star's mass and that distance do not agree with Kepler's third law, so the page uses the one the period and the star's mass give.
See bet Pic d in 3D · The picture is an artist's impression.
The star
- Surface temperature
- 8,039 K
- Width
- 1.544 × the Sun's
- Mass
- 1.789 × the Sun's
- Spectral type
- A6 V
- Distance
- 64 light-years