Newest Known Exoplanet Discovered with Argentine Scientific Participation
Astronomers have discovered the youngest known exoplanet, a baby world named Elías 2-24 b that is less than one million years old and possesses a mass comparable to Jupiter, located approximately 450 light-years from Earth. The discovery was announced after a team of researchers utilized advanced archive observations from the WM Keck Observatory in Hawaii, working alongside data from the Odisea project.
A Newborn Giant 450 Light-Years Away
International Collaboration and Study Roots
The finding features contributions from Argentine scientists. Santiago Orcajo, a graduate of the Universidad de La Plata, participated in the earlier stages of the research by focusing on the evolution of gas and dust disks surrounding young stars.
Challenging Current Planetary Formation Models
Elías 2-24 b remains embedded within the massive protoplanetary disk of gas and dust from which it formed, sitting inside the Ophiuchus molecular cloud. According to Cieza, the discovery exposes limitations in current planetary formation models. Previous theoretical frameworks struggled to explain the origins of slightly older objects that span roughly five million years, leaving a significant gap in scientists’ understanding of early planetary development.
Peering Past Stellar Glare with Keck Observatory
To bypass the blinding glare of the central star, the research team analyzed archive data captured by the Keck Observatory’s coronógrafo, an instrument built to block stellar light and reveal fainter orbiting bodies. The detection of Elías 2-24 b offers researchers a chronological baseline to examine how planetary systems develop during their earliest stages.
Numerical Reconstructions and the Odisea Project
The investigation builds upon numerical models and disk evolution reconstructions developed by the research team over preceding years. Observational data collected through the Ophiuchus DIsk Survey Employing ALMA (Odisea) project ultimately provided the structural evidence needed to link the observed disk phenomena directly to a newly forming planet.