WORLD NEWS
A planet younger than one million years has become the youngest confirmed exoplanet
The Jupiter-scale object lies in a gap in a gas-and-dust disk about 450 light-years away and is still gathering material.
The team reprocessed archived Keck images from 2018 and 2020 and compared them with VLT observations and ALMA disk structure.
Why it is a record
Earlier record holders were older than five million years, so this object exposes a much earlier stage of giant-planet growth.
What the gap shows
Planets have long been suspected of carving disk gaps, but finding one inside a gap is difficult. Independent instruments pointing to the same location made the case stronger.
What remains unknown
Its precise mass, temperature, atmosphere and accretion rate remain uncertain because it sits near current detection limits.
Next check
Spectroscopy and orbital monitoring should refine its dynamical mass and test how quickly core-accretion models can build a giant planet.
Primary source and independent checks
The Astrophysical Journal Letters 원 논문
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