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 in Chile. The object’s orbit was estimated to be about eight times the diameter of Earth’s.
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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 ().
