IE 11 is not supported. For an optimal experience visit our site on another browser.

Rare Newborn Planet May Be the Youngest Ever Detected

A distant, Neptune-size planet 500 light-years from Earth appears to be the youngest fully formed exoplanet ever found crossing its star.
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.)
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
/ Source: 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.

Read More: First Alien Earth Still Elusive Despite Huge Exoplanet Haul

"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.)
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.

Read More: Venus' Twin? New Earth-Sized Exoplanet GJ 1132b Found in Our Neighborhood

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.

Read More: Most Powerful Supernova Ever Discovered Blasts Away Competition

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.

Email Sarah Lewin at slewin@space.com or follow her @SarahExplains. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Read the original version of this article on Space.com.

Read More from Space.com.