While hunting for planets that orbit stars other than our sun, known as exoplanets, astronomers with the European Southern Observatory (ESO) have come across an exotic "first."

Through the use of direct imaging, researchers have spotted a new exoplanet , which is shown in the slideshow above (circled in red).

The bright blue sphere in the image is CVSO 30, a T-Tauri star located about 1,200 light-years away from the Earth. In 2012, astronomers discovered that the planet had an exoplanet, CVSO 30b, by using transit photometry, according to the ESOrelease. This detection method picks up on where the light from a star dips as a planet travels in front of it.

Researchers went back to look at the system using a number of telescopes, such as ESO’sVery Large Telescope (VLT)in Chile, theW. M. Keck Observatoryin Hawaii, and theCalar Alto Observatoryin Spain. It was with these enhanced views that they were able to discover CVSO 30c.

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“While the previously-detected planet, CVSO 30b, orbits very close to the star, whirling around CVSO 30 in just under 11 hours at an orbital distance of 0.008au, CVSO 30c orbits significantly further out, at a distance of 660au, taking a staggering 27,000 years to complete a single orbit,” ESO wrote in the release.

If astronomers confirm that CVSO 30c orbits CVSO 30, this would be "thefirst starsystem to host both a close-in exoplanet detected by the transit method and a far-out exoplanet detected by direct imaging," the release added.

Direct imaging is particularly effective for planets on wide orbits around young stars because the light from the planet isn’t overwhelmed by the light from the host star.

, but direct imaging promises to be more productive in the near future as technology improves, according to Space.com. It may even provide the first convincing evidence of alien life, some astronomers have said.

Astronomers are still exploring how such a rare system came to form in such a short timeframe, considering the star is only 2.5 million years old. It’s possible that the two planets interacted at some point in the past, scattering off one another and settling in their current extreme orbits, according to ESO.

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