Saw a baby planet, one of the youngest ever discovered. It is called 2M0437b and despite being a 'newborn', formed a few million years ago, it has a mass greater than our Jupiter. The discovery, published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, is from the University of Hawaii at Manoa.
Thousands of planets outside our Solar System are known by now, but very few can boast of being as young as 2M0437b and above all of being observed in direct form. A combination of elements that makes the newly discovered baby planet one of the most interesting objects for studying the formation of planets and their evolution over time.
"To make this discovery - said Michael Liu, one of the authors of the study - two of the largest telescopes in the world were needed, the technology of adaptive optics and the clear sky of Maunakea", one of the islands of the Pacific archipelago on which includes the Subaru Telescope and the Keck Observatory which exploit 'intelligent' optics capable of continuously changing, even with thousands of deformations per second, to cancel the distortions caused by the Earth's atmosphere. A technology that allows you to adapt to environmental conditions, which is why it is called adaptive.
The new planet had been observed for the first time in 2018, but it took years of study to reveal many details, such as age and orbit, and in the future we aim to learn more especially about its composition and the dynamics that led to it. to the disappearance of the disk of gas and dust that surrounded its 'mother' star.
According to the data, 2M0437b is located along a very wide orbit, with a radius of about 100 times the distance that separates the Earth and the Sun, it would be about the same time as the first islands of Hawaii, about 5 million years ago and its surface temperature is still that of the lava coming out of volcanoes, just over 1,000 degrees centigrade.
