Newly discovered young planet gives insight into planet formation

Planet creation is an intricate and tumultuous sequence that remains largely unknown.

The recent discovery of a very young planet, reported in the journal Nature, could provide tantalizing new clues as to how planets are established.

Astronomers have identified more than 3,000 planets orbiting distant stars, also known as exoplanets. However, almost all of these planets are middle-aged, unable to offer significant clues on planet formation.

Now, a team of scientists found the youngest fully-formed exoplanet ever. The planet, K2-33b, is only 5 to 10 million years old, considered a baby planet.

The first indicators of the planet’s existence came from NASA’s Kepler space telescope. The telescope found a regular dimming in the light released by the planet’s host star that suggested the presence of an orbiting planet. Findings from the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii confirmed the dimming was in fact brought on by a planet.

“At 4.5 billion years old, the Earth is a middle-aged planet – about 45 in human years,” study author Trevor David, a graduate student at Caltech, told redOrbit in a statement. “By comparison, the planet K2-33b would be an infant of only a few weeks old.”

An exciting planetary find

“This discovery is a remarkable milestone in exoplanet science,” added co-author Erik Petigura, a postdoctoral scholar at Caltech. “The newborn planet K2-33b will help us understand how planets form, which is important for understanding the processes that led to the formation of the earth and eventually the origin of life.”

When stars develop, they are surrounded by a thick disk of gas and dust, known as a protoplanetary disk, from which planets form. When a young star is a few million years old, this disk has mostly dissipated and planet creation is generally finished.

The star orbited by K2-33b has a small quantity of disk material remaining, shown by observations from NASA’s Spitzer space telescope. This shows the disk is in the last stages of dissipating.

“Astronomers know that star formation has just completed in this region, called Upper Scorpius, and roughly a quarter of the stars still have bright protoplanetary disks,” David says. “The remainder of stars in the region do not have such disks, so we reasoned that planet formation must be nearly complete for these stars, and that there would be a good chance of finding young exoplanets around them.”

The researchers said they now plan to assess the planet’s mass and density in order to determine if it will stay about the same size or if it will cool and shrink.

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Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

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