The infant planet is among seven greatest alien planet discoveries by Kepler.
By Rakesh Agrawal
Insatiable inquisitiveness is the core of human nature and the scientists are always engaged to discover something new, even from the fathomless universe.
Following this principle, the astronomers have just announced the discovery of a rare newborn planet that could also so the youngest one as being only 5 million to 10 million years old as the star it revolves around is of the similar age, meaning being just an infant, on a cosmic scale, as “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, says.
And, he is right as in you compare its age with that of our earth, this planet, named K2-33b, is indeed an infant at a distance of 500 light-years from Earth, this t, Neptune-size planet, is the youngest fully formed exo-planet ever found crossing its star, at a very high speed, that is nearly 10 times closer to its star than Mercury is to the sun.
Researchers first found the planet, which whisks around its star every five days, using the Kepler space telescope currently orbiting the sun alongside Earth.
In comparison with this newfound planet, almost all other more than 3,000 confirmed planets around other stars orbit stars more than 1 billion years old, so this young star and planet pair offers a rare opportunity to see earlier stages of planet development.
Kepler detected the planet as the said star was dimming and brightening very fast in a periodic manner that was its transit. Researchers used data from the Keck Observatory in Hawaii and NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope verified that the darkening was caused by the planet and to see that the star is surrounded by a thin layer of debris, most likely the remnant of a thick disk of debris that encircled the star when it first formed, the raw material for the formation of a planetary system
“Initially, this material may obscure any forming planets, but after a few million years, the dust starts to dissipate,” Ann Marie Cody, a postdoctoral researcher at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California, said in the statement. “It is during this time window that we can begin to detect the signatures of youthful planets in K2.”
The newly discovered K2-33 system and its planet, K2-33b, compared to the size of Earth’s solar system. The planet is nearly 10 times closer to its star than Mercury is to the sun, and it orbits every five days (compared to Mercury’s 88).
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.
This infant planet is among seven greatest alien planet discoveries by NASA’s Kepler Spacecraft so far.