Astronomers have discovered thousands of planets in the cosmos, but most of them have been observed indirectly by seeing how the planet affects its star. Recently, scientists observed an exoplanet directly – and it is one of the youngest planets ever discovered.
Planet 2M0437b orbits at around 100 times the distance between our planet and the Sun and is several times the mass of Jupiter. The planet was formed a few million years ago, which is relatively a small time in astronomical terms. It is so young that it is still hot from the energy released during its formation.
Three years to capture the image
The planet was first spotted with the help of the Subaru Telescope, located on Maunakea in Hawaii, and was further investigated by the W. M. Keck Observatory. Despite the planet’s distance from its star and its size, it took three years to observe and image it.
“This serendipitous discovery adds to an elite list of planets that we can directly observe with our telescopes,” said lead author Eric Gaidos, a professor at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. “By analyzing the light from this planet we can say something about its composition, and perhaps where and how it formed in a long-vanished disk of gas and dust around its host star.”
Going forward, the researchers want to see if they can measure the planet’s orbital motion, and more advanced telescopes like the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope could even come in handy to see the gases in its atmosphere or detect a Moon-forming disk of matter around it.
Future telescopes to make work easy
“Two of the world’s largest telescopes, adaptive optics technology, and Maunakea’s clear skies were all needed to make this discovery,” said co-author Michael Liu, a scientist at the Institute for Astronomy. “We are all looking forward to more such discoveries and more detailed studies of such planets with the technologies and telescopes of the future.”
Previously, a team of researchers that features scientists from Cornell, the University of Toronto, and Queens University Belfast found ionized calcium on the exoplanet WASP-76b. Hints of ionized calcium were discovered using high-res Spectra data gathered by the Gemini North instrument in Hawaii.
