A Newborn World Was Discovered By Scientists, And It Could Explain How Earth Came To Be
Recently, scientists have discovered a “newborn” exoplanet that could help explain how our very own Earth came to be. It is the youngest transiting planet ever found. At about three million years old, it is practically a baby, barely a blink in the vast timeline of the universe.
Madyson Barber, the lead author of the study and a graduate student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, made the discovery. It is the third time that Barber has discovered a planet.
“This is definitely our biggest one because it’s the youngest transiting system,” said Barber. “There’s so much we can learn by looking outward to learn more about our own home and where we come from and where we might be going.”
The planet has been named both IRAS 04125+2902 b and TIDYE-1b. It is located about 520 light-years from Earth and orbits what will likely become an orange dwarf star.
Every 8.8 days, it circles its host. Its mass is between that of Neptune and Earth. It is less dense than our home planet but has a diameter that is 11 times greater.
Barber spotted signs of the distant planet during a transit event, which occurs when a planet passes between a star and its observer, briefly dimming the star’s light.
Most exoplanets are found during transits. Barber noticed small decreases in starlight, indicating the transit of a planet.
However, this seemed strange since the star was so young. In the past, astronomers have detected more than a dozen planets transiting stars that spanned from 10 million to 40 million years old. But younger transiting planets have always managed to escape their studies.
The reason for that is nascent solar systems contain a protoplanetary disk, which circles the young host star. The disk tends to surround the star for its first five million to 10 million years of life, blocking astronomers’ view of younger planets.
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With TIDYE-1b, the outer protoplanetary disk is misaligned, and the inner disk is gone. As a result, astronomers had the chance to observe the planet.
It is unclear exactly how long it takes for planets to form. Large planets must form at a rate faster than their disk is depleted because they need much of the gas from the disk to reach such enormous sizes.
The discovery confirms that planets can form within three million years. It took Earth about 10 to 20 million years to develop. Moving forward, the researchers will work on finding more young transiting systems.
“Because we don’t have a ton of these young transiting systems that we know of, it’s really important that we look for more so that we can have a better picture of what that formation and evolution looks like, so we can better understand how our own home formed and evolved,” Barber said.
The study was published in the journal Nature.
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