A newborn planet munches on gas and dust surrounding its host star

A hungry newborn planet is eating away at a disk of gas and dust around a young star, researchers report in two studies in the Sept. 1 Astrophysical Journal Letters. The growing body travels along a gap within the swirling material, confirming that baby planets shape the rings observed in planet-forming, or protoplanetary, disks.

It’s the first planet seen forging a path in the gas and dust that birthed it, says astronomer Richelle van Capelleveen of Leiden University in the Netherlands. “That is what makes it so special.”

For the last two years, van Capelleveen and her colleagues have been studying a 5-million-year-old star called WISPIT 2, some 400 light-years from Earth, as part of a survey of young stars about as massive as the sun that might host extremely far-off planets. Infrared images captured by the Very Large Telescope in Chile revealed a multiringed protoplanetary disk around WISPIT 2, which wasn’t unusual, given its age.

Photos taken by the telescope this past spring uncovered something surprising: a planet orbiting in an empty space within the disk. Further observations from the Large Binocular Telescope in Arizona looking at light emitted by hydrogen showed that the newborn planet is still growing, pulling in hydrogen gas and other material from the disk.

“You don’t really assume that you’re going to find something like that by accident,” van Capelleveen says. Astronomers have been searching for planets embedded in protoplanetary disks for a long time, but they’re hard to see when shrouded in gas and dust. The researchers caught this baby planet after it had carved enough of a gap to easily view it.

The newfound object, dubbed WISPIT 2b, is about five times the mass of Jupiter, which means it’s probably a giant gas planet. It orbits its host star at nearly 60 times the distance between the sun and Earth, farther than the outer edge of the solar system’s ice- and rock-filled Kuiper Belt.