Scientists have recently discovered a giant "baby planet" orbiting around young stars, unearthing more insights of planetary and solar system evolution.
The celestial entity is among the youngest exoplanets ever discovered, just a few million years old, which take five days to complete their revolution around its star. Caltech-based astronomers discovered the fully-formed young exoplanet using the Kepler Space Telescope. Designated as K2-33b, the newfound baby planet is around 5 to 10 million years old.
"At 4.5 billion years old, the Earth is a middle-aged planet - about 45 in human-years. By comparison, the planet K2-33b would be an infant of only a few weeks old," said Trevor David one of the study authors describing the new planet as quoted by EarthSky.
Although more than 3,000 exoplanets have already been identified by astronomers, most of them are already middle-aged (billions of years old or older), making it difficult for scientists to get a clearer understanding of how planetary systems came to be.
"It is extremely rare to find a planet at this stage of its infancy, and gives us a unique opportunity to try and understand more about how all planets form and develop, including Earth," remarked Dr Sasha Hinkley, an astronomer at the University of Exeter and a member of the research team behind the discovery, Ten Play reported.
K2-33b is reportedly six times the size of Earth located some 500 light years away. From their calculations, scientists estimate that the young planet is close to Neptune's size in our solar system. However, the planet is 10 times closer to its parent star than Mercury is to our sun that it only takes K2-33b five Earth-days to complete a revolution. Neptune, on the other hand, orbits the sun for 165 Earth-years.
The planet's close proximity to its star continues to baffle scientists. Currently, they offer two explanations for such close orbit. First, the baby exoplanet could have formed a little far from its current location and was gradually pulled inward. The other possible explanation is that the planet was actually born at its present location.
"The fact that K2-33b is so close-in at such a young age means that if it did migrate, it needed to do so quickly," said study co-author Erik Petigura as quoted by the Guardian. "This rules out a whole class of migration models that take hundreds of millions of years to operate."
With this discovery, scientists hope that future generations of scientists will help unlock the mysteries regarding the origins and life cycles of planetary systems especially our very own, solar system.
