A young planet has been spotted eating gas and dust from around its star

A young planet

For the first time, scientists have seen a newborn planet carving out rings of gas and dust in space. The planet moves through a gap in the disk of material around its star, proving that baby planets can shape these rings as they grow.

Astronomer Richelle van Capelleveen from Leiden University in the Netherlands says this makes the discovery very special.

The team has been studying a 5-million-year-old star called WISPIT 2, about 400 light-years from Earth. Using the Very Large Telescope in Chile, they saw a disk of gas and dust with many rings around the star, which is common for young stars.

But earlier this year, the telescope revealed something new — a planet inside one of the empty spaces in the disk. Follow-up observations with another telescope in Arizona showed that the planet is still growing, sucking in hydrogen gas and other material.

The planet, named WISPIT 2b, is about five times bigger than Jupiter, making it a giant gas planet. It orbits very far from its star, about 60 times farther than Earth is from the Sun — even beyond the edge of our solar system’s Kuiper Belt.

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