Astronomers have discovered and confirmed roughly 3000 exoplanets so far.
AB Wire
Astronomers have discovered a newborn fully formed exoplanet – planets that orbits beyond Sun- ever detected. This discovery was made using NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope and its extended K2 mission, as well as the W.M Keck Observatory on mauna Kea, Hawaii.
The newfound planet named K2-33b is a bit larger than Neptune and whips tightly around its star every five days. It is only 5 to 10 million years old, making it one of a very few newborn planets found to date.
“Our Earth is roughly 4.5 billion years old,” Trevor David of Caltech in Pasadena, lead author of a new study published in the journal Nature said. “By comparison, the planet K2-33b is very young. You might think of it as an infant.” He added.
So far, astronomers have discovered and confirmed roughly 3000 exoplanets. However, nearly all of them are hosted by middle-aged stars, with ages of a billion years or more.
“The newborn planet will help us better understand how planets form, which is important for understanding the processes that led to the formation of Earth,” said co-author Erik Petigura of Caltech.
K2 measured the first signals of the planet’s existence and the telescope’s camera detected a periodic dimming of the light emitted by the planet’s host star, a sign that an orbiting planet could be regularly passing in front of the star and blocking the light.
NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope’s Infrared measurements showed that the system’s star is surrounded by a thin disk of planetary debris, indicating that its planet-formation phase is ending.
The planet K2-33b is nearly 10 times closer to its star than Mercury is to Sun, making it hot.
Ames manages the Kepler and K2 missions for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, managed Kepler mission development. Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corporation operates the flight system with support from the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado at Boulder.