Wednesday, September 23, 2026

Astronomers Directly Image the Youngest Exoplanet Ever

ARtist' image of the forming planet around Elias 2-24. Credit - W.M. Keck Observatory / A. Bernardi et al.

Most exoplanets we find have been around a long time. They’ve cleared out their orbital path (one of the requirements of planethood, as fans of Pluto well know), have their own gravitational pull, and in many cases shine with their own infrared light. But it takes a long time to get to that point - finding “young” planets is much harder. But a new paper available in The Astrophysical Journal Letters by a research team led by Andrea Bernardi of Diego Portales University in Chile describes a new paper that definitely takes the prize as the youngest exoplanet we’ve yet found.



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