New world
Astronomers spot a ‘baby planet’ born 50 million years after the dinosaurs went extinct
Infant world is just 10 million years old and makes our ancient Earth look like an old age pension planet
Astronomers have discovered a baby world that's the youngest planet ever spotted out in space.
The newly-found planet is called K2-33b and is aged between five and ten million years old.
This infant world makes Planet Earth look like a clapped out old timer, because our home has been around for a whopping 4.5billion years.
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The junior planet is about the size of Neptune and is set in a star system that's 500 light years from Earth.
It is one of the few 'baby' planets to have been discovered to date and could shed light on Earth's evolution.
Senior lecturer Dr Sasha Hinkley of Exeter University said it provides "an extraordinary snapshot of the planet formation process".
He said: "It's extremely rare to find a planet at this stage of its infancy and gives us a unique opportunity to try and understand more about how all planets form and develop, including Earth.
"We would really like to know if this planet formed at its present location or perhaps formed much farther from the star and moved much closer in.
"This is a crucial development as it will give us the opportunity to discover a more in depth understanding of the life cycle of planetary systems.
"In the same way a person's development is more easily understood if you can study them from being a baby, through childhood and into adulthood, so our understanding of the planets will only increase by learning more about them during their early existence."
The team detected the new planet using NASA's alien hunting Kepler space telescope.
It identified a recurring dimming in the light emitted by the planet's host star that hinted an orbiting planet was regularly passing in front of it.
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When stars form they are encircled by dense regions of gas and dust called protoplanetary disks from which planets form.
By the time a young star is a few million years old this disk has largely dissipated and planet formation is mostly complete.
The star orbited by the new exoplanet has a small amount of disk material left - indicated by observations from NASA's Spitzer space telescope - suggesting it's in the final stages of dissipating.
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Trevor David, a graduate student at California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, said: "Astronomers know star formation has just completed in this region, called Upper Scorpius, because roughly a quarter of the stars still have bright protoplanetary disks.
"The remainder of stars in the region do not have such disks so we reasoned planet formation must be nearly complete for these stars and there would be a good chance of finding young exoplanets around them."
Dr Hinkley said the team were able to study how often the light emitted from the star dimmed - and by how much - to determine the orbit and size of the new exoplanet.
The study was published in Nature.
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