Astronomers have discovered two of the youngest exoplanets ever found. The two worlds, born around separate stars, are each just a few million years old — mere infants compared to the planets in our 4.6 billion-year-old solar system.
The findings, described in two papers by different teams in the journal Nature, could offer some insight into the development of gas giants such as “hot Jupiters” and the evolution of their planetary systems.
The younger of the two planets orbits a star named V830 Tau, which sits some 430 light-years away. This star is young — scientists think it might be just 2 million years old. The planet, discovered using three ground-based telescopes, circles it in just 4.9 days. The scientists think it holds about 77 percent of the mass of Jupiter.
The second planet, K2-33b, takes 5.4 days to circle its star, which sits in the “Upper Scorpius” region. While they don’t know its mass, it appears to be 5.8 times as wide as Earth. Scientists think this planet, identified using NASA’s Kepler telescope, might be somewhere around 5 million to 10 million years old.