Astronomers have discovered the youngest exoplanet ever recorded, finding the “newborn” world hidden in archival data.
About as massive as Jupiter, Elias 2-24 b is less than a million years old and lies about 450 light-years from Earth. Unlike most known exoplanets, it is still embedded in the swirling disc of gas and dust from which it formed.
The previous record-holder for the youngest known exoplanet was more than five million years old. “Elias 2-24 b shows us that even our best planet-formation models are still missing some important processes,” said Lucas Cieza, co-author of the study and a professor at the Instituto de Estudios Astrofísicos in Chile.
The discovery was made by a team led by Andrea Bernardi, a doctoral candidate at Universidad Diego Portales in Chile, who examined archival observations from the W M Keck Observatory in Hawaii. Earlier observations by the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope had suggested that a planet could be hiding in a gap in the disc surrounding the star Elias 2-24.
The team confirmed the planet using data collected with Keck’s coronagraph, an instrument that blocks the bright glare of a star, allowing astronomers to detect light reflected from orbiting planets.
Researchers examined coronagraph data from seven stars surrounded by discs of gas and dust where planets may be forming. In the disc around Elias 2-24, they found the young planet hiding in one such gap.