An international team led by astronomers from the University of Hawaii at Manoa has discovered a newly formed planet. Although thousands of planets have been discovered, the novelty of this one is that it is newly formed (it is still hot!) And, in addition, it can be observed. The new planet has been named 2M0437b .
“This fortuitous discovery adds to an elite list of planets that we can observe directly with our telescopes,” explained the lead author of the study that has been published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society , Eric Gaidos, professor in the Department of Sciences of the Earth from the University of Manoa. “By analyzing the light from this planet we can tell something about its composition, and perhaps where and how it formed in a long-disappeared disk of gas and dust around its host star.”
Researchers estimate that the planet is a few times more massive than Jupiter, and that it formed with its star several million years ago, when the main Hawaiian islands first emerged over the ocean. The planet is so young that it is still warm from the energy released during its formation, with a temperature similar to that of the lava that gushes from the Kilauea volcano.
In 2018, 2M0437b was first seen with the Subaru Telescope on Mauna Kea by UH Institute for Astronomy (IfA) visiting researcher Teruyuki Hirano. Over the past few years, it has been carefully studied using other telescopes.
Gaidos and his collaborators used the Keck Observatory, near the dormant volcano Mauna Kea, to follow the position of the host star as it moved across the sky, confirming that planet 2M0437b was indeed a companion to it, and not a more distant object. The observations have lasted for three years because the star moves slowly across the sky.
The planet and its parent star meet in a stellar “nursery” called the Taurus Cloud . 2M0437b is in a much wider orbit than the planets in the Solar System. Their current separation is approximately one hundred times the Earth-Sun distance , making it easy to observe. However, sophisticated “adaptive” optics are still needed to compensate for image distortion caused by Earth’s atmosphere.
“Two of the world’s largest telescopes, adaptive optics technology, and the clear skies of Mauna Kea were needed to make this discovery,” said co-author Michael Liu, an astronomer at IfA. “We all look forward to more discoveries of this type and more detailed studies of such planets with the technologies and telescopes of the future.”
It is possible that not too late we will have more news about this new planet. “Observations with space telescopes like NASA’s Hubble and the soon-to-be-launched James Webb Space Telescope could identify gases in its atmosphere and reveal whether the planet has a moon-forming disk,” Gaidos added.
