Astronomers have confirmed a planet less than a million years old, making it the youngest known planet. Called Elias 2-24 b, the baby planet is still moving through the disk of dust and gas from which it was formed, according to NASA .
Most confirmed exoplanets have been discovered through transits, when a planet passes in front of its star and briefly reduces the amount of light reaching Earth. The discovery was made using data from NASA-funded archives. In a study published Wednesday in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, a team led by Andrea Bernardi, a doctoral candidate at the Universidad Diego Portales in Chile, studied archival observations of seven stars. The observations were made using the coronagraph at the W M Keck Observatory in Hawaii, which partners with NASA under a cooperative agreement. Scientists use complex theories, simulations and observations of young stars with disks to understand how planets form. However, he added that there is a large gap in what most telescopes can detect, leaving scientists mostly unable to observe these baby planets.
The planet is orbiting the star Elias 2-24, which is about 450 light-years from Earth, and has a mass roughly similar to Jupiter. Lucas Cieza, a professor at the Instituto de Estudios Astrofisicos in Chile and co-author of the study, said existing planet-formation models already struggled to explain the previous youngest known planets, which were all more than 5 million years old. He said Elias 2-24 b shows that important processes are still missing from even the best planet-formation models. Finding more young planets like Elias 2-24 b could help astronomers improve these models.
Cieza said the galaxy continuously produces new stars and planets, meaning there are objects at every stage of evolution.
