TECH

Rare Newborn Planet May Be

the Youngest Ever Detected
BY SARAH LEWIN, SPACE.COM
A distant, Neptune-size planet 500 light-years from Earth appears to be the youngest fully formed
exoplanet ever found crossing its star, raising questions about how it formed so close, so quickly.

Researchers first found the planet, which whisks around its star every five days, using the Kepler
space telescope currently orbiting Earth. Its star is only 5 million to 10 million years old,
suggesting that the planet is a similar age incredibly young, on a cosmic scale. Researchers
said it was the youngest planet spotted fully formed around a distant star, and it is nearly 10
times closer to its star than Mercury is to the sun.

"Our Earth is roughly 4.5 billion years old," Trevor David, a graduate student researcher at the
California Institute of Technology and lead author of the new study, said in a statement. "By
comparison, the planet K2-33b is very young. You might think of it as an infant."

The planet K2-33b, discovered during the Kepler space telescope's K2 mission, is the youngest
fully formed exoplanet ever found. The Neptune-size planet is 5 million to 10 million years old.
(For comparison, Earth is 4.5 billion years old.) NASA/JPL-Caltech
Most of the more than 3,000 confirmed planets around other stars orbit stars more than 1 billion
years old, NASA Jet Propulsion Lab officials said in the statement so this young star and
planet pair offers a rare opportunity to see earlier stages of planet development.

Kepler detected the planet during its K2 mission by catching the star dimming and brightening
periodically as the planet passed in front of it a detection process known as the transit method.
Researchers used data from the Keck Observatory in Hawaii and NASA's Spitzer Space
Telescope, in orbit around Earth, to verify that the darkening was caused by the planet and to see
that the star is surrounded by a thin layer of debris.

Combined with its youth, the planet's close proximity to its star is a puzzling feature of the newly
found system, the researchers said. Some astronomical theories suggest that a planet of its
mass would have to form farther out and slowly migrate inward over hundreds of millions of years,
but the star is too young for a process that long to have occurred, the researchers said in the
statement.

Instead, it must have either migrated much more quickly, in a process called disk migration
powered by the orbiting disk of gas and debris, or formed right at the spot that researchers see it
in now.

The planet K2-33b is one of two newborn-planet announcements published in today's issue of
Nature. The other newborn planet, which orbits a 2-million-year-old star called V830 Tau located
430 light-years away, appears to be a giant planet near the size of Jupiter sitting in an orbit one-
twentieth the distance from Earth to the sun.

The researchers identified the planet by watching its star wobble back and forth periodically as
the massive planet orbited. If that planet formed farther outward and migrated closer, it would
have had to rush in at a very early stage of its formation.