![\"Planets](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/00241ba8-614.jpg\"\/)
\nPlanets forming around the young star WISPIT 2<\/p>\n
A Galway astronomer has led an international research team that has discovered a new planet, estimated to be five million years old and ten times the mass of Jupiter.<\/p>\n
It has been located in the same system where another planet was located for the first time in 2025.<\/p>\n
‘WISPIT 2c’ is in the constellation of the Eagle, which can be seen in the northern hemisphere between July and November.<\/p>\n
Chloe Lawlor, a PhD student from the University of Galway\u2019s Centre for Astronomy, made the discovery during ongoing research with German and Dutch colleagues.<\/p>\n
The same team discovered ‘WISPIT 2b’ last year.<\/p>\n
Both planets were detected using the European Southern Observatory\u2019s Very Large Telescope (VLT), which is located in Chile\u2019s Atacama Desert.<\/p>\n
Ms Lawlor said the team suspected there might be more to discover after their initial finding but were uncertain if an object they detected was a large dust clump or a planet.<\/p>\n
Using multiple telescopes to form a large virtual telescope, they were able to take a spectrum image, which revealed elements and molecules in the object\u2019s atmosphere.<\/p>\n
\nPlanets forming around the young star WISPIT 2<\/p>\n
Further analysis of this “chemical fingerprint” showed carbon monoxide gas, something commonly found in the atmospheres of young planets.<\/p>\n
“When we saw it, we knew we had something significant,” said Ms Lawlor.<\/p>\n
The gas leaves a strong and distinctive chemical signature in telescope data, providing the crucial evidence needed to confirm the discovery.<\/p>\n
The planets are located in what is only the second known young multi-planet system.<\/p>\n
It could resemble our Solar System, given the two gas giant planets that are in its multi-ringed dust disk.<\/p>\n
WISPIT 2c is considered to be very young, based on temperature and its radius from the atmosphere spectrum.<\/p>\n
It is twice as big as the previously detected WISPIT 2b and orbits four times closer to its host star, which makes it incredibly difficult to detect with ground-based telescopes.<\/p>\n
The new discovery offers scientists a rare opportunity to study how massive planets form and evolve, shedding new light on the early processes that ultimately led to the formation of Earth.<\/p>\n
Details of the research will be published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A Galway astronomer has led an international research team that has discovered a new planet, estimated to be…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":362768,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[61,60,82,247],"class_list":["post-362767","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-science","tag-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/362767","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=362767"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/362767\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/362768"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=362767"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=362767"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=362767"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}