Astronomers at UNC-Chapel Hill have found one of the youngest known planets in the galaxy.
The planet IRAS鈥�04125+2902鈥塨, or TIDYE-1b, is about three million years old, which when compared to Earth at 4.5 billion years old is like discovering a two-week-old infant.
"The planet is just smaller than Jupiter in radius and it orbits its star about every 8.8 days," said UNC graduate student Madyson Barber, who identified the baby planet.
"And we get the age of the planet based on the age of the star, and we age the star based on the family that the host star is a member of."
TIDYE-1b is more than 400 light-years away in a stellar nursery called the Taurus Molecular Cloud.
It's a rare find that happened in part because it's not on the same plane as its star's , the donut-shaped birthplace of planets made of dust and gas that surrounds the star.
Usually the disk obscures astronomers' views of the new planets it creates, but TIDYE-1b's orbit and the disk go around the star at different angles.
Barber said it's still a mystery as to why they are misaligned.
The planet's short orbit also makes it easier to observe than some other planets that would take much longer to move from the far side of their stars to the side closer to Earth.
"Because it's so young, it can give us more information about planet formation that even slightly older planets that we would still consider to be very young 鈥� that 20- to 30-million-year-old range 鈥� are already too old to probe those formation paths," Barber said.
Astronomers have found evidence of other younger planets, but this is the youngest planet to be observed between us and its star.
The discovery was published in the journal .
