Scientists photograph a baby planet 5 times as massive as Jupiter

When a new star is forming, it is usually surrounded by a disk called a protoplanetary disk. Astronomers have noticed ring-shaped gaps in these disks. These gaps are areas where the gas and dust that form this disk are less dense.

Theorists believe that young planets exist in this disk and are responsible for the gaps as they pull in gas and dust to support their growth. And now, for the first time, scientists have found evidence to support this theory.

The discovery was made by a team led by Laird Close, a University of Arizona astronomer, and Richelle van Capelleveen, an astronomy graduate student at Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands. A van Capelleveen-led study first discovered the WISPIT 2 star and its ring system using VLT-SPHERE (Very Large Telescope – Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast Exoplanet REsearch).

The researchers then used the Mag AO-X (Magellan Adaptive Optics system eXtreme) to capture the young planet, called WISPIT 2b, in H-alpha light. They also observed WISPIT 2b in infrared light using LMIRcam, which is a part of the Large Binocular Telescope Interferometer (LBTI) on the University of Arizona’s Large Binocular Telescope.

In the image, WISPIT 2b is the small purple dot to the right of the WISPIT 2 star system. Interestingly, the researchers discovered a second candidate planet in another dark ring gap closer to WISPIT 2. Future research will likely delve into that finding. This WISPIT 2b finding was published on August 26 in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.