Caption: This composite of two images shows the planet beta Pictoris b and a disk of material both of which orbit the young star beta Pictoris. Both are taken in infrared light. The inner image was one of the first pictures taken of a planet around another star (an exoplanet). This image was made using a technique called adaptive optics which removes the blurring effect of the Earth's atmosphere that spreads out a star's light. The star's light is then concentrated tightly enough that it can be hidden behind a blocking circle (shown here in black) called a coronagraph. The ripples around this are artifacts of the imaging process. Beta Pictoris b, a gas giant planet about twelve times the mass of Jupiter, appears as a dot above and to the left of the black circle. The outer image shows the thermal emission from the warm disk of material surrounding the young star beta Pictoris. As we are viewing this disk edge-on it appears as a line. This disk of gas and dust provided the material to form beta Pictoris b.
Credit: ESO/A.-M. Lagrange et al. credit link

Caption: This series of images shows the orbital motion of the extrasolar planet (exoplanet) beta Pictoris b. The planet is the bright dot in each image. The planet's host star is hidden behind the black circle in the middle of each image. This is done to remove the much brighter host star which would otherwise drown out the light from the planet. The planet's orbit is viewed edge-on. Seeing the orbit from this perspective makes it look like the planet moves along a straight line. Between February 2015 and November 2016 beta Pictoris b appears to move closer and closer to its host star. The planet then moved so close to the star that it was not seen for almost two years, after which it reappeared on the other side of the star.
Credit: ESO/Lagrange/SPHERE consortium credit link

Caption: The constellation Pictor with its bright stars and surrounding constellations. Pictor is surrounded by (going clockwise from the top): Columba, Caelum, Dorado, Volans, Carina and Puppis. Pictor is notable for its second brightest star, Beta Pictoris. This young star hosts a large disk of dusty material left over from the planet formation process along with two planets, one of which Beta Pictoris b was one of the first planets to be directly imaged by astronomers. Pictor is a southern constellation and thus the whole constellation is visible at some point in the year throughout the southern hemisphere. The whole constellation is also visible from some equatorial regions of the northern hemisphere with parts of the constellation visible to the remaining northern equatorial regions and some northern hemisphere temperate zones. Pictor is best viewed in the northern hemisphere winter and southern hemisphere summer. The y-axis of this diagram is in degrees of declination with north as up and the x-axis is in hours of right ascension with east to the left. The sizes of the stars marked here relate to the star's apparent magnitude, a measure of its apparent brightness. The larger dots represent brighter stars. The Greek letters mark the brightest stars in the constellation. These are ranked by brightness with the brightest star being labeled alpha, the second brightest beta, etc., although this ordering is not always followed exactly. The dotted boundary lines mark the IAU's boundaries of the constellations and the solid green lines mark one of the common forms used to represent the figures of the constellations. Neither the constellation boundaries, nor the lines joining the stars appear on the sky.
Credit: Adapted by the IAU Office of Astronomy for Education from the original by the IAU and Sky & Telescope