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The baby planet that broke every record Elias: 2-24 b
Did you know astronomers just photographed the youngest planet ever discovered? It’s called Elias 2-24 b, and it’s less than a million years old… and it’s still wrapped in the very disk of dust and gas it was born from! It’s so far from its star more than 54 astronomical units away, beyond Pluto’s orbit that it barely moved 1.5° along its orbit between 2018 and 2020. At that rate, it would take hundreds of thousands of years to complete a single full lap. And yet, despite being so far out in the cold, it reaches up to 1,600 degrees Kelvin! Hotter than many much older planets. We’re literally watching…
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Astronomers discover the youngest planet in the universe: How Elias 2-24 b was born
Astronomers confirm the youngest exoplanet ever detected — less than a million years old and still wrapped in the disk of gas and dust it’s forming within. A newborn cosmic baby Planets, like people, are born too. And an international team of astronomers has just found the youngest newborn of them all: Elias 2-24 b, an exoplanet less than a million years old — a mere instant on the cosmic timescale. Located 450 light-years from Earth, this world weighs between 1 and 4 times the mass of Jupiter and is still wrapped in the disk of gas and dust surrounding its star, pulling in material as it continues to grow.…
