NASA Spotted A Very Young Planet. It Could Become A Super-Earth.

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"A huge planet with a long name ⁘ IRAS 04125+2902 b ⁘ is really just a baby: only 3 million years old," NASA recently explained. "And because such infant worlds are usually hidden inside obscuring disks of debris, it is the youngest planet so far discovered using the dominant method of planet detection." (For reference, our middle-aged planet, Earth , is some 4.5 billion years old.)

Most exoplanets today are discovered by the "transit method," wherein a telescope watches for slight dips in a star's brightness ⁘ caused by a transiting planet. Although the method doesn't work if the star and greater solar system are shrouded in debris, a research team found that the ring of debris in IRAS 04125+2902 b's solar system has become "sharply warped," thus revealing the baby world. Their research is published in the science journal Nature .

What might have caused this unusual warping? It's unclear, though the researchers have ideas. Unlike the sun , most stars have stellar companions (called binary systems), including the stars in this distant solar system. It's possible that this companion star's gravity and influence could have stoked a shift in the nascent planetary disk; however, there's no evidence of such an effect. It's also possible the young planet got bumped out of its obscured orbit by another larger object in space , but there's no evidence of that yet, either.

The young world, some 430 light-years away, orbits close to its star and has a mass that's at most one-third of the gas giant Jupiter , yet measurements show it's about the same diameter as Jupiter (at 88,846 miles, or 142,984 kilometers, across, Jupiter is 11 times wider than Earth). This suggests its developing atmosphere is inflated, and will trim down. But into what?

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