Astronauts claim to have found youngest planet
The planet is just 395 light-years away and its creation began just 1.5 million years ago, according to a study published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
In comparison, the Earth is 3,000 times older than this infant planet and its parent star, the study found.
The study indicates that the planet, in the constellation of Ophiuchus, is so young that gas and dust continue to gather. That nascent planet is nestled in the arms of its parent star.
“It’s like looking into your own past,” says Myriam Benisty, a researcher at the Institute of Planetology and Astrophysics of Grenoble in France and a co-author of the study.
The planet is probably the youngest exoplanet ever found in about 5,000 discoveries to date outside the home solar system.
The James Webb Space Telescope, the most powerful in the world, is already producing stunning imagery. Scientists are ready to deploy it in order to obtain clearer data about the baby planet.
‘We infer that the mass of the planet is about the mass of Jupiter. How did a giant planet come together with an orbital radius of 200? It is possible that the AS 209 disc was gravitationally unstable in the past and that the planet formed as a result of gravitational instability,” the scientists said.
The observation of planets at this early age allows us to place strong constraints on the mechanism and the time scale of planet formation, crucial for finding out more about the formation and evolution of giant planets,’ explains the paper.
The distance of the baby planet from its mother star is 200 which is approximately 19 billion miles.
Questions about this universe’s origin have always intrigued modern science. And, the baby planet offers this opportunity to tackle some vital issues about the origin of planets and solar systems.