Space is not the place of the infant world. Like little people, the planets are covered by a swirling layer of matter from which they are formed, hiding them from view. But a team of researchers’ analysis of a giant planet orbiting a 3-million-year-old star provides a rare glimpse into a newly formed world because, as it turns out, it’s just a baby.
The planet is the smallest so far discovered by the prominent planet-finding method, according to the researchers, who have named it IRAS 04125+2902 b—a big name for a nice little guy. Astronomers spotted the baby planet because its outer debris disk is highly warped, making it visible to space telescopes. The team’s findings are detailed in a paper published on nature, and challenge current theories of how planets form.
A small alien world is about the same size as its parent star. It probably formed about 3 million years ago, young in cosmic age (Earth, by comparison, is 4.5 billion years old). The baby planet is located in the Taurus Molecular Cloud, an interstellar region full of newborn stars located about 450 light-years away from Earth. It orbits its star at close range, completing one full orbit in just under nine days.
Despite its small size, it’s still a big boy, about 10 times the diameter of Earth and about one-third the mass of Jupiter. That means it is likely to have a hot climate that will decrease over time as it is still in the process of forming. Over time, the planet could become a gaseous mini-Neptune or a rocky Super-Earth, according to the paper.
The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TES) spotted the baby planet in November 2019. TESS searches for worlds by observing the slight dip in starlight as the planet passes in front of it from an observer’s perspective. TESS isn’t usually in the business of catching babies, but the young star system’s twisted disk made it possible for the space telescope to spot IRAS 04125+2902 b.
The disk of the star system remains a mystery. Disks, the swirls of gas and dust that surround a newly formed star, are usually parallel to the plane of the planet’s rotation. The orbit of the baby planet and the rotation of the host star are aligned with the orientation of the edge, the team found, but the disk of the star system is tilted at an angle of 30 degrees. As an oddity, disc anomalies may be due to objects falling into the star-forming region surrounding the system.
Baby Planet provides unique insights into the early years of planet formation, a beautiful glimpse into the universe that we rarely see.
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