A consortium of several astronomical institutions, of which MPIA is an essential member, has constructed and built this highly successful instrument. These results were made possible thanks to the sophisticated Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast Exoplanet REsearch instrument (SPHERE) mounted on the Very Large Telescope (VLT) at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Chile. This large distance from the central pair of stars could be key to the planet’s survival. Moreover, it revolves around the binary star at a staggering 100 times greater distance than Jupiter does from the Sun, one of the widest orbits discovered yet. It is ten times more massive than Jupiter, making it one of the most massive planets ever found. Indeed, the planet discovered, named b Centauri (AB)b or b Centauri b, is an alien world experiencing conditions completely different from what we face here on Earth and in our Solar System. This discovery adds another exciting chapter to this story, this time for massive stars.” “ Over the last ten years, the discovery of many planetary systems in surprising and novel configurations has made us widen our historically narrow view. “ We have always had a very solar system centric view of what planetary systems are ‘supposed’ to look like,” MPIA scientist and co-author Matthias Samland points out. Now, the latest discovery demonstrates planets can, in fact, form in such extreme stellar environments. It was believed that it should be exceedingly difficult to form large planets around them,” Janson explains. “ B-type stars are generally considered as quite destructive and dangerous environments. This property causes the surrounding material to evaporate more efficiently. In particular, the hotter a star is, the more high-energy radiation it produces. The large mass and heat from this type of star strongly impact the surrounding gas, which should counteract planet formation. Due to its high temperature, it emits large amounts of UV and X-ray radiation. Most massive stars are also very hot, and this system is no exception: its primary star is a so-called B-type star that is over three times hotter than the Sun. Until now, previous studies had failed to detect any such object around a star more than three times as massive as the Sun. This property makes it by far the most massive stellar system around which astronomers have found a planet. The only 15 million years old b Centauri binary star has at least six times the mass of the Sun. He is the main author of the new study published in Nature today. “ Finding a planet around b Centauri was very exciting since it completely changes the picture about massive stars hosting planets,” explains Markus Janson, an astronomer at Stockholm University, Sweden. Located approximately 325 light-years away in the Centaurus constellation, astronomers have detected a giant planet in orbit around a young massive binary star called b Centauri.