NASA Finds The Youngest Planet Ever And It's Still Being Born
Using NASA archives and ground-based observatories, astronomers have discovered Elias 2-24 b, a gas giant under one million years old that has just become the youngest exoplanet ever detected.
Located about 450 light-years from Earth within the star-forming ρ Ophiuchi cloud complex, Elias 2-24 b orbits around a young, orange dwarf star. Elias 2-24 b itself is still actively growing; roughly equivalent in mass to Jupiter, this giant offers scientists an extraordinarily rare real-time look at planetary evolution.
Elias 2-24 b shatters previous records held by four-way ties among worlds orbiting stars such as PDS 70 and WISPIT 2, all of which are older than five million years. At less than a million years old, Elias 2-24 b was born in a fraction of the time predicted by conventional core-accretion models. Theoretically, building a Jupiter-sized planet should require millions of years for dust grains to coalesce into planetesimals, gradually...
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