Discovery of a new exoplanet orbiting unusually massive star Mu2 Scorpii

This is an image of the system Mu2 Scorpii 615 light years away taken with the Very Large Telescope. In the middle is a massive star, whose brightness was lowered to allow us to see the exoplanet b in the circle. The other objects are just stars in the background. There are only about 20 directly imaged exoplanets so far.

Exoplanets are planets orbiting other stars. There are more than 5 000 known worlds, but only few were imaged directly. Most of the other known exoplanets were discovered when they blocked some of the light coming from their stars (known as transit). There are special space telescopes dedicated to study this dip in brightness of the star (Kepler, TESS, CHEOPS).