Astronomers weren't looking for a planet of record age when they went back to old observational data, but they found in it what may be the oldest snapshot available of a giant planet's birth stage.
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A team led by Andrea Bernardi, a doctoral student at Diego Portales University in Chile, has confirmed the existence of the planet Elias 2-24 b, which is less than a million years old, making it the youngest known planet to date. Located approximately 450 light-years from Earth, it has a mass similar to that of Jupiter and is still accreting gas and dust from the disk surrounding its star.
The significance of this discovery lies in the fact that scientists rarely get to observe planets in their early stages of formation. The previous record was shared equally among four planets orbiting the stars PDS 70 and WISPIT 2, all of which were over 5 million years old.
As for "Elias b24," it gives researchers a closer chance to observe a giant planet during its formation, a stage that planet formation models are still unable to fully explain.
A planet hiding inside a gap
The story began when previous observations of the star Elias 2-24 revealed a disk of gas, dust, rock, and ice surrounding it, with gaps and ring-like structures visible within. These gaps suggest that planetary bodies may have formed or are still forming within them, as a developing planet can attract surrounding material and push some of it away from its orbit, leaving a gap in the disk.
Using data from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array and the Very Large Telescope in Chile, previous evidence has emerged of an object inside one of these gaps.
Why did the planet baffle scientists?
The term exoplanet means a planet that orbits a star other than the Sun. A protoplanetary disk is a flattened mass of gas, dust, rock, and ice surrounding a young star, and planets gradually form within it from these materials.
Elias 2-24b appears to be at the heart of this process; it lies within a distinct gap in the disk and continues to receive material from it. However, the existence of a planet with a mass similar to Jupiter's at such an early age poses a challenge to models of planet formation.
Lucas Siezza, a professor at the Institute of Astrophysical Studies in Chile and one of the study's participants, says that current models were already struggling to explain the planets that held the previous record, and that this discovery indicates that important processes are still missing from scientists' understanding of planet formation.
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