Searching for planets with molecular fingerprinting

The star Beta Pictoris is 63 light years from Earth. In 1983, a dusty disk was discovered around it and in 2008, an exoplanet. This exoplanet is a gas giant with thirteen times the mass of Jupiter and was named Beta Pictoris b. Now the planet is being used for a test run of a new method for searching for planets. The technique, which the team of researchers describes here, works like this:

The fact that planets can rarely be seen directly in a telescope is normally due to the brightness of th...