This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Astronomers have confirmed a world less than a million years old as the youngest known planet, using data from archives. Called Elias 2-24 b, the baby planet is still whirling in its natal disk of dust and gas.
"Our planet-formation models already struggled to explain the previous record holders for the youngest known planet—a four-way tie between two planets orbiting the star PDS 70 and two planets orbiting the star WISPIT 2—which are all more than 5 million years old," said Lucas Cieza, a professor at the Instituto de Estudios Astrofísicos in Chile and co-author of a paper detailing the results. "Elias 2-24 b shows us that even our best planet-formation models are still missing some important processes." 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, homed in on archival observations of seven stars observed using the coronagraph at the W. Keck Observatory in Hawaii, which partners with NASA under a cooperative agreement.
Each of these stars hosts a debris disk chock-full of dust, gas and chunks of ice and rock. Structures and gaps in the disks hint that planets may be forming around them. With the coronagraph blocking light from the host stars, astronomers searched for fainter planets orbiting those stars that could be embedded in the dusty disks.
Planets found outside our own solar system are called exoplanets. "The planets should be found within the gaps, since they are carving them," Bernardi said. "And that's exactly where we found Elias 2-24 b." The planet orbiting the star Elias 2-24 is about as massive as Jupiter, and the star is about 450 light-years from Earth.
Studying this system offers a time machine of sorts for scientists to explore what our own planetary system may have been like billions of years ago. Stars are born in swirling clouds of gas and dust, swaddled in haze. Orbiting planets form from leftover material that clumps up and gradually sculpts a path around the star.
But it's difficult to study an exoplanet's newborn stage because of all the dust that shrouds them. Most of the exoplanets we've discovered so far have been found using transits, which happen when a planet passes in front of its star and temporarily dims the amount of light we receive. Those transits are hard to spot when planets are still deeply buried in dust or orbiting far from the star.
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