‘Baby’ exoplanet, equivalent to a two-week-old baby, is the youngest alien world ever spotted – and orbits a shaky star

On November 28, 2024By Pranco

A ‘baby’ exoplanet recently spotted relatively close to Earth is the youngest alien world ever seen, a new study suggests. Researchers say the rare sighting is linked to a mysteriously shaky proplanetary disk around the exoplanet’s host star.

The newly discovered exoplanet, known as IRAS 04125+2902 b or TIDYE-1b, is a lightweight gas giant with a diameter slightly smaller than Jupiter‘s only about 0.4 times the mass of the solar system‘s largest planet. It orbits a protostar – a baby star still growing to its final size – in the Molecular cloud of Taurus about 520 light-years from Earth and completes one rotation around the protostar every 8.8 days.

Based on the age of the protostar, which currently has a mass of about 70% that of our Sun, TIDYE-1b could be only 3 million years old – about 1,500 times younger than Earth. If you were to compare the exoplanet’s current age to the lifespan of a human, it would be a two-week-old baby, researchers wrote in a paper. statement.

Researchers described the baby exoplanet in a new study, published Nov. 20 in the journal Nature. The exoplanet was first spotted in data collected by NASA‘s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) as it continued to pass in front of its host star.

“Discovering planets like this allows us to look back in time and glimpse planetary formation as it happens,” says lead author Madyson Barbera graduate student at the University of Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill said in the statement. “(It) helps us explore our place in the universe – where we came from and where we might be going.”

An artistic interpretation of a planetary disk orbiting a star

Baby exoplanets are normally hidden from us by the swirling protoplanetary disks around protostars. (Image credit: ESO)

Exoplanets are normally not visible until they are more than 10 million years old, because until then they are obscured by protoplanetary disks – the swirling rings of dust, gas and other planetary building blocks where exoplanets form. But even then, only a dozen exoplanets have been found that are less than 40 million years old.

In this case, however, TIDYE-1b is not obscured by the star’s protoplanetary disk.

“Planets typically form from a flat disk of dust and gas, which is why the planets in our solar system align in a ‘pancake-flat’ arrangement,” study co-author Andreas Manna planetary scientist at UNC Chapel Hill said in the statement. “But here the disk is tilted, misaligned with both the planet and its star — a surprising twist that challenges our current understanding of how planets form.” The disk is believed to be misaligned from the star by about 60 degrees, Mann added another explanation.

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Researchers are unsure why the disk is misaligned or why TIDYE-1b is not within this disk. One possible explanation is that the disk was pulled out of place by a companion star, which orbits the protostar at a distance of about 635 astronomical units (635 times the distance between Earth and the Sun). However, this may be unlikely given the distance from the companion star, researchers wrote.

The discovery helps fill in gaps about how different worlds come into being. For example, experts believe that it took between 10 million and 20 million years for the Earth to fully form, while gas giants like TIDYE-1b apparently take much less time to form. But there is still more to learn.

Researchers plan to conduct follow-up studies of the young world to assess whether it is still accumulating material from the disk, how its atmosphere compares to the surrounding disk material, and whether it is losing its upper atmosphere due to the influence of its host star. .