The youngest exoplanet ever detected has been discovered by astronomers

Many exoplanets are discovered each year with the help of telescopes. However, some are particularly interesting, such as Elias 2-24 b, the youngest exoplanet ever discovered by astronomers. 

To confirm it, a team led by Andrea Bernardi, a doctoral candidate at the Universidad Diego Portales in Chile, studied the archives of the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii. Using a coronagraph, they analyzed seven stars with debris disks composed of gas, dust, ice, and rock. 

Thus, by blocking out the light with the coronagraph, they were able to detect Elias 2-24 b, an exoplanet orbiting its star, named Elias 2-24. With an estimated mass between 1.9 and 4 times that of Jupiter, it is located about 450 light-years from Earth. Furthermore, according to their estimates, it is less than a million years old, making it the youngest exoplanet ever discovered. 

However, while its age and mass allow astronomers to study the early stages of a planet's formation, astronomers had doubts about its true nature. As a result, they explored new archives from the Keck Observatory, uncovering previous observations from 2018 and 2020. By combining these observations to analyze its motion, they noticed that it behaved like a planet, thereby confirming this discovery. 

But this record could be broken in the coming years. Indeed, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope was launched on August 30, 2026, and will be able to use its coronagraph to discover new worlds.