An ancient baby
in a stellar nursery.
Hot off the star press.
One of the youngest planets ever discovered has been recorded by a team of researchers working with the Subaru and Keck-2 telescopes on the dormant volcano Mauna Kea on the island of Hawai’i. The planet, 2M0437b, was first spotted in 2018 and has taken 3 years of observations to confirm.
2M0437b is found, along with its parent star (2M0437), in a stellar ‘nursery’ called the Taurus Cloud and was formed several million years ago, around the same time as when the island it was observed from emerged above the ocean. In fact, the planet is so young it’s still hot from its formation, approximately the temperature of lava: 1400-1500K. The planet is a few times larger than Jupiter and has an orbit around its star that’s around 100 times as far as the distance between Earth and the Sun.
The young planet can help further build our understanding of how planets form, and challenges some current explanations. As Gaidos et al. (2021) say “the discovery of a super-Jupiter around a very young, very low mass star challenges models of planet formation by either core accretion (which requires time) or disc instability (which requires mass).” Future observations with space telescopes such as the Hubble will help to provide more information about the infant planet and further build our knowledge of the universe.
Original research: https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.08655