Astronomers have found the smallest planet in the galaxy

Over the past 30 years, astronomers have found more than 5000 exoplanets, an eclectic zoo of worlds far from our astral neighborhood. The latter may just be an infant.

in the magazine Astrophysical Journal LettersAnd scientists on Tuesday announce Convincing evidence of a world that is only 1.5 million years old, making it one of smallest Planets ever found, probably the smallest.

This world – 395 light-years from Earth in the constellation Ophiuchus – is so small that its building blocks of gas and dust are still gathering. This planet is a newborn baby resting in the arms of its mother star.

“It’s like looking back at our past,” he said. Myriam BenestiD., an astronomer at the Institute of Planetary Science and Astrophysics in Grenoble, France, and co-author of the study.

Since the suspected planet is surrounded by the material that makes it up, more telescopic observations will be needed to confirm its existence. Assuming it isn’t Rocky detritus disguised as a planetScientists can use it to better understand how worlds are made.

A torrent of newly discovered exoplanets Complex or refute Long-standing theories of planetary formation. But this small planet’s location – within the disk of primordial matter around its star – supports the idea that most planets spend most of their time growing up in a similar kind of nursery.

The discovery of the celestial point indicates that “all planetary systems have a common formation process” Anders Johansson, an astronomer at Lund University in Sweden was not involved in the study. Despite the chaos of the universe, he said, “there is actually a lot of order” when it comes to crafting planets.

The team of scientists used the Atacama large millimeter/submillimeter matrix (Alma), a group of 66 antennas working in unison in Chile, to gather evidence of this very young scientist. Gas and dust orbit certain stars in what are called stellar disks. This material, which clumps together to form planets within these disks, emits radio waves that ALMA can detect.

Last year, Dr. Benisty and colleagues used ALMA to make the first unequivocal discovery of a an aura of gas and dust Orbiting an exoplanet: Foundry around the planet still makes the world that shrouds it, and maybe a few moons too.

In the latest study, they pointed to ALMA at AS 209, a star slightly heavier than the Sun. At only 1.5 million years old, it has only recently begun to burn hydrogen – the stellar equivalent of a young child uttering his first words.

The peripheral disc of AS 209 was found to have several vacuoles. And in one of those loopholes, ALMA detected the radio-wave signal of a planet-making storm, a gas presumably surrounding a Jupiter-like world still under construction.

The exact age of the planet will not be determined soon, but it is likely that it will be very similar to its nascent star. But his youth isn’t the only thing that interests astronomers. It is also puzzlingly far from its star. Neptune, the farthest planet in our solar system, is about 2.8 billion miles from the sun. This exoplanet is about 19 billion miles from its star.

This raises questions about our neck in the woods.

The size of the debris disk that formed Earth and other planets is uncertain. “The disk was probably a little larger than Neptune’s orbit, which is why Neptune is the farthest planet,” said Dr. Johansen. But our center of planet-making material may have been more like that of AS 209. If that’s the case, “we also can’t rule out that our solar system has a planet outside Neptune,” he said — perhaps supposed planet 9 Which some astronomers believe linger in the distant darkness.

in the coming days , James Webb Space Telescope He will determine the mass of the planetary newborn and study the chemistry of the atmosphere. And by painting a detailed picture of one of the smallest worlds known to science, these observations will bring us all closer to answering the ultimate question, Jihan Baian astronomer at the University of Florida and author of the study: “Where did we come from?”