Directly imaged planet orbits two suns closer than any prior circumbinary world

A young giant planet about 5.6 times Jupiter’s mass, HD 143811 AB b, was directly imaged in a binary star system roughly 446 light-years away. It orbits the two stars at about 63 AU with a 320-year period, six times closer to the stellar pair than any previously imaged circumbinary planet. The discovery, made through reanalysis of archival Gemini/GPI and Keck/NIRC2 data, challenges current ideas about planet formation and migration in dynamically complex circumbinary disks and provides a valuable three-body laboratory for refining models of how such worlds form and evolve.