In the dark clouds of gas and dust where new stars are just igniting, the Keck Telescope in Hawaii picked out two faint points of light next to young stellar objects. These aren't stars but their companions — too light to shine on their own. One of them, KOINTREAU-3b, circles the star ISO-Oph 96 at a staggering distance—340 times farther than Earth is from the Sun. If it were in our solar system, it would lie far beyond Neptune's orbit.

The second companion, KOINTREAU-4b, stays closer to its star, 2MASS J16262785-2625152, at a distance of 180 astronomical units (one astronomical unit is the Earth–Sun distance). Its mass is estimated at 11–15 Jupiter masses. This is a borderline zone: a bit lighter, and it's a giant planet; a bit heavier, and it's a brown dwarf — an object that failed to become a star because thermonuclear fusion never kicked in its core.

To spot these faint companions next to brilliant young stars, astronomers used adaptive optics — a system that cancels out atmospheric blur, as if the telescope were peering from space. This allowed them to see objects hundreds of times fainter than their stars. The discovery adds to the known exoplanets and brown dwarfs in active star-forming regions, where planets are still taking shape.