Subaru Telescope uncovers giant planet and dwarf star

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December 24, 2025
3 min read

Subaru Telescope uncovers giant planet and dwarf star

The Subaru Telescope (named after the Japanese for the Pleiades cluster) has been used to identify a giant planet and a brown dwarf. These are the first successes of OASIS (Observing Accelerators with SCExAO Imaging Survey), pairing precise space-based data with the telescope’s powerful imaging system to make discoveries that would be very difficult otherwise.

Only 1% of stars are known to have massive planets or brown dwarfs orbiting that can be directly captured with telescopes. Even when they are young and still glowing from the heat generated by their formation, they are still dimmer than the stars they orbit. Their faint light is overwhelmed by that of the star.

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Another challenge presented is where to look for them in the first place. OASIS narrowed down the potential targets by analysing measurements from European Space Missions, Hipparcos and Gaia, tracking tiny motions in stars caused by the gravity of anything in orbit. When a star shows signs of this, OASIS turns the Subaru Telescope towards it, using the telescope’s Coronagraphic Extreme Adaptive Optics (SCExAO).

Of the discoveries, the planet, HIP 54515 b orbits a star 271 light-years away and is 18 times more massive than Jupiter. It orbits the star at the same distance that Neptune orbits the sun. The brown dwarf, HIP 71618 B, has a mass 60 times that of Jupiter and sits 169 light-years away in the Bootes constellation.

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