NEED TO KNOW<\/p>\n
Elias 2-24 b is the youngest planet ever discovered<\/p>\n
The planet, about the mass of Jupiter, is still forming in a disk of gas and debris<\/p>\n
“This is just the beginning of a new era of discovery,” Lucas Cieza, a professor at the Instituto de Estudios Astrof\u00edsicos in Chile and co-author of the study, said<\/p>\n
Astronomers have confirmed what is now the youngest known planet ever discovered, identifying a world that is less than a million years old and still taking shape around its young star.<\/p>\n
The planet, known as Elias 2-24 b, is roughly the mass of Jupiter and sits about 450 light-years from Earth, according to NASA<\/a>.<\/p>\n Unlike most of the other 6,000 confirmed exoplanets \u2014 a term used for planets outside of the Earth’s solar system \u2014which are billions of years old, Elias 2-24 b is still embedded in the dusty disk of gas and debris left over from its star’s formation.<\/p>\n Researchers found the planet inside a prominent gap in a location where scientists expected a forming planet to be.<\/p>\n “The planets should be found within the gaps, since they are carving them,” said Andrea Bernardi, the lead author of the study<\/a> published on Wednesday in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. “And that’s exactly where we found Elias 2-24 B.”<\/p>\n By combining archival observations from the W. M. Keck Observatory taken in 2018 and 2020, researchers were able to track the object’s movement and confirm that it was behaving like a planet rather than a background star or imaging artifact.<\/p>\n “We usually hear about telescopes working separately, but this confirmation was possible only by using multiple telescopes together,” said Bernardi. “Elias 2-24 b is at the limit of what current telescopes can detect, but with new instruments like NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, such detections should become easier.”<\/p>\n The discovery could give astronomers a rare look at the earliest stages of planetary formation and help refine theories about how giant worlds like Jupiter come together.<\/p>\n “Our planet-formation models already struggled to explain the previous record holders for the youngest known planet \u2014 a four-way tie between two planets orbiting the star PDS 70 and two planets orbiting the star WISPIT 2 \u2014 which are all more than 5 million years old,” said Lucas Cieza, a professor at the Instituto de Estudios Astrof\u00edsicos in Chile and co-author of the study.<\/p>\n