A giant planet spent more than a decade concealed inside one of astronomy’s most closely watched star systems.

Astronomers have discovered a planet named Beta Pictoris d orbiting a young star just 63 light-years from Earth. The gas giant is about 100 times fainter than Beta Pictoris b, the first planet found in the system, making it the faintest exoplanet ever directly imaged from the ground. Researchers later discovered that it had been hiding in telescope observations for as long as 11 years.

“This was a serendipitous discovery,” says Ben Sutlieff, an astronomer at the University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom, and co-lead of one of two studies published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. “We initially wanted to look more at a known planet in the system, Beta Pictoris b, to see how it changed over time,” he adds.