Rare Newborn Planet May Be the Youngest Ever Detected
Source: Space.com
Rare Newborn Planet May Be the Youngest Ever Detected
By Sarah Lewin, Staff Writer | June 20, 2016 05:19pm ET
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."
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.
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Read more: http://www.space.com/33228-newborn-exoplanet-youngest-ever-detected.html
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Source: Daily Mail
Is this the youngest world in our galaxy? 'Baby planet' just 10 million-years-old could shed light on how solar systems form
By RICHARD GRAY FOR MAILONLINE
PUBLISHED: 15:00 GMT, 20 June 2016 | UPDATED: 16:21 GMT, 20 June 2016
The youngest fully-formed planet ever detected has been spotted orbiting a star 500 light years away.
Aged just 5-10 million years old, K2-33b, as the planet has been named, is just a baby by cosmic standards.
Yet astronomers believe it could provide vital clues about how the planets in our own solar system formed and evolved.
The planet resembles Neptune in size – the fourth largest planet in the solar system and more than 30,700 miles across – meaning it is nearly four times bigger than our own world.
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Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3647051/Is-youngest-planet-galaxy-Giant-infant-world-500-light-years-away-10-million-years-old.html
