Scientists find youngest exoplanet on record — a 'newborn' named Elias
That's one big baby.
Astronomers have discovered the youngest exoplanet ever found, named Elias 2-24 b, lurking in old data archives. The baby planet, about as massive as Jupiter, is thought to be less than a million years old, making it a newborn compared to other record-holding planets estimated to be over 5 million years old. Located 450 light-years away from Earth in the swirling gas and dust where it was born, this diminutive world was identified using observations from the W.M.
Keck Observatory in Hawaii. The breakthrough came after spotting the planet's telltale signature in the gap of a debris disk surrounding its parent star, Elias 2-24. This discovery, published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, indicates our planet-formation models still have room for improvement. With new instruments like NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope set to launch, researchers hope to detect and study even younger planets in the future.
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