Astronomers have discovered the exoplanet fully formed youngest ever detected. The discovery was made using the Space Telescope Kepler NASA mission K2 , Observatory and the WM Keck, said the space agency through its website.
The new planet, K2-33b , is a little larger than Neptune and firmly around your star each five years. Just between 5 and 10 million years, making it one of the few planets newborns have been found to date.
“Our Earth is about 4.5 billion years old,” said Trevor David, a researcher of the new study published in Nature . “By comparison, the planet K2-33b is very young. Might think it’s a baby, “he said according to the NASA .
The formation of a planet it is a complex and tumultuous process remains shrouded in mystery. Astronomers have discovered and confirmed about 3,000 exoplanets so far. However, almost all are harbored by middle-aged stars, aged millions of years. For astronomers try to understand the early life cycles of planetary systems with these worlds it is like trying how babies grow into adults, adults only studying.
“The newborn planet will help us better understand how planets form, so it is important to understand the process that led to the formation of the Earth,” said co-author Erik Petigura.
A surprising feature of the discovery of K2-33B is so close that newborn planet is from its star. The planet is almost 10 times closer to its star than Mercury of our Sun making it one extremely hot. While many exoplanets older have been found orbiting very close to their star , astronomers have struggled to understand how planets massive as this have orbits so small. Some theories proposed that takes millions of years to a planet closer to the orbit, but this can not explain the case of K2-33b , being so young.
For the research team now there are two theories could have migrated in a process called disk migration that takes hundreds of thousands of years, or the planet may have formed in situ, ie, in where is it.
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