Eridani b: Astronomers discover young planet that ‘looks like Jupiter’ 100

That might sound ancient to most people, but, as the researchers behind the discovery noted, it formed “40 million years after the dinosaurs died out”. It’s not guaranteed that this younger system will evolve the same way ours did, but it certainly could.

However, 51 Eridani B has a far cooler atmosphere with a temperature of just 430 degrees Celsius. “To get a good look at a planet that’s the same distance from its star as Earth is from the sun, you’d have to wait, say, three years to see three passes”. “This one looks like a planet”, he said.

Maybe our solar system isn’t such an oddball after all.

“We found that 51 Eridani is surrounded by warm dust that indicates the presence of an asteroid belt”, says Patel, who led the WISE study and whose previous work identifying recycled planetary dust, known as “debris disks”, around close to a hundred other star systems, puts the discovery of the exoplanet in context.

Other telescopes, like NASA’s Kepler observatory, look for planets indirectly. This means that the planet orbiting it is also young and may tell researchers a bit more about planet evolution.

Imaging an exoplanet directly like this is incredibly hard; a planet’s host star is usually so luminous that it often washes out all nearby objects. The study, published in the journal Science, shows the former is twice as heavy as the latter – which is at least two times less than any previously discovered exoplanets.

In the “cold start” hypothesis, huge planets form by slowly putting together a rocky core over millions of years.

Astronomers seeking to unlock the mysteries of our solar system believe that they have found a planet that is essentially a baby portrait of Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system. The newbie planet was discovered by the Gemini Planet Imager, or GPI, and is the first to be found in that way.

Astronomers have discovered a new gas-filled planet described as a “young Jupiter” almost 100 light years from Earth with a new instrument that captures light from outside the solar system. “And by studying the light from it … we can hope to understand the process that made it forms”.

“Of all the directly imaged planets so far, this is the first one where we’ve gotten a spectrum that shows methane”, Bruce Macintosh, the head of the GPI team, a professor of physics at Stanford University and a member of the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology, said to redOrbit via email.

Space.com calls 51 Eridani b “perhaps the coldest and smallest exoplanet ever to be directly imaged. The light from the planet is very faint – more than 3 million times fainter than its star – but GPI can see it clearly”, Stanford News reported. With this new learning about an exoplanet (one outside our solar system), we might find out more about how planets formed around the Sunday.