Youngest known planet confirmed in rare glimpse of planet formation
Astronomers have confirmed what is now the youngest known planet, identifying a Jupiter-sized world that is less than one million years old and is still embedded in the gas and dust surrounding its newborn star.
Called Elias 2-24 b, the planet orbits a star about 450 light-years from Earth. Its discovery gives researchers an unusually early look at planet formation, at a stage when worlds are still gathering material from the disk left over after their stars are born.
The study, led by doctoral candidate Andrea Bernardi of Universidad Diego Portales in Chile, was published on September 16 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. The researchers examined archived observations of seven young stars made using the coronagraph at the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii.
Their search focused on gaps within dusty disks surrounding the stars. Such gaps can be created as forming planets sweep up material along their orbital paths. Elias 2-24 b was found within one of these gaps.
The discovery of the youngest known planet also settles a mystery that began around a decade ago. Observations by the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) had revealed a gap in the disk around Elias 2-24, while later observations from the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope detected a faint object inside it.
The difficulty was explaining how a planet roughly as massive as Jupiter could have formed so quickly, particularly at such a great distance from its star. Elias 2-24 b is around 55 times farther from its star than Earth is from the Sun.
To confirm its nature, Bernardi and colleagues returned to observations stored in the Keck Observatory Archive. They found the object in data collected in both 2018 and 2020. Tracking its movement showed that it was consistent with a planet orbiting Elias 2-24 rather than a background star or imaging artefact.
Lucas Cieza, a professor at the Instituto de Estudios Astrofísicos in Chile and co-author of the study, said the discovery indicates that current planet-formation models are missing important processes.
Future observations with NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope could reveal more young planets, helping astronomers understand how rapidly giant worlds can form.
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