Austin (KXAN) — A tiny baby planet is making waves in the science community. Named WISPIT 2b, the growing planet is the first planet of its kind to be basically photographed growing inside its star’s ring.
A gas giant five times more massive than Jupiter, the planet is just five million years old. The Earth, for comparison, is nearly five BILLION years old. The planet is just 437 light-years from our solar system.
The baby planet was spotted in the protoplanetary disk of its star, WISPIT. This disc is a rotating disc of gas and dust around a young star. Leftovers from when the star was born, scientists have long believed this spinning disc is where planets form. Gaps also form in these rings, possibly as planets orbit the star and clear them out.
In a new paper published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, WISPIT 2b was observed in one of these gaps. It also likely formed in this gap, not moving from elsewhere in the solar system.
Additionally, the researchers studying WISPIT 2b spotted a second possible planet in one of the star’s rings’ gaps.
Locating WISPIT 2 and its planets required telescope networks all around the world. First spotted by the VLT-SPHERE (Very Large Telescope – Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast Exoplanet REsearch) in Chile, then by the University of Arizona’s MagAO-X extreme adaptive optics system, also in Chile.
MagAO-X takes high contrast images of exoplanets, planets outside our solar system. While studying the planet with this imager, the team discovered the gap in the ring where the planet formed.
Researchers on the project included University of Arizona astronomer Laird Close and Richelle van Capelleveen, an astronomy graduate student at Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands.
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