NASA’s brand new ‘baby’ exoplanet sheds light on planetary evolution

Researchers said it was the youngest planet spotted fully formed around a distant star, and it is almost 10 times closer to its star than Mercury is to the sun.

Planets form out of the disk of dust and gas that surrounds nascent stars, eventually coalescing into rocky bodies, gas giants, comets, asteroids and other denizens of the void.

The new exoplanets are estimated to be between 5 million and 10 million years old. In a June 20, 2016 statement from Caltech, they said Earth is about 4.5 billion years old, and almost all known exoplanets are middle-aged, at least a billion years old or older.

There are a few methods astronomers use to search for exoplanets, or planets orbiting other stars. As it turns out, the proximity of the giant planet K2-33b to its star is not too out of the ordinary for planets in our galaxy-many have been discovered “close in”, often completing an orbit around their parent star in weeks or even days. This discovery was made using NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope and its extended K2 mission, as well as the W.M Keck Observatory on mauna Kea, Hawaii. That may seem pretty damn old for the likes of you and me, but in the timeline of the Universe, this world is a mere infant. However, middle-aged stars that have the ages of a billion years or more host almost all of them. But that process was thought to take hundreds of millions of years – way longer than K2-33b has been around. K2-33b could have formed on a farther out orbit and quickly migrated inward.

Many astronomers, including Donati, argue that such planets could not have formed in such a location as there would not be enough material available for the formation of a planet the size of Jupiter. “It is during this time window that we can begin to detect the signatures of youthful planets in K2”.

So far, scientists have come up with two possible scenarios to explain this phenomenon: In the first scenario, these planets were born and raised in the hot inner disk close to their star.

Because of the young age of the newly identified exoplanets, their solar systems could be good candidates to study planetary formation in action.

It is one of the few “baby” planets to have been discovered to date and could shed light on Earth’s evolution. Analysis of the space body may hold the key to understanding processes that led to Earth’s formation, researchers say. To put it’s age into perspective, while our first hominid ancestors were climbing out of the trees and spreading throughout the African continent, K2-33b was still forming from a protoplanetary disk. K2-33b is fully formed by it make time more time to evolve.

“Understanding how planets form is important if we’re to understand the formation of the Earth, and ultimately, how we got here”, said Erik Petigura, co-author of the paper about the Neptune-sized planet, to the Guardian.

NASA’s planet-hunting Kepler space telescope spotted a Neptune-size planet which could be the youngest exoplanet ever discovered.

The discovery of K2-33b has given theorists a new data point to ponder. “We are saying, at least in this one case, that they can indeed be there at a very early stage”.