Newborn Planet - Youngest Ever Found

The youngest planet ever detected has been found developing inside a distant "womb of gas," scientists have announced.

The embryonic planet may only be a few hundred years old, providing a unique look at how planets are made, according to a team of astronomers led by Jane Greaves of the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.

"We were amazed when we found it," Greaves said, noting that the next youngest confirmed planet is ten million years old. The newfound protoplanet, named HL Tau b, was discovered taking shape about 520 light-years away in the constellation Taurus. HL Tau, the parent star, is itself in its infancy, since it's believed to be less than a hundred thousand years old. Our own sun, by comparison, has been blazing for more than 4.5 billion years.

The new planet is a "distinct orbiting ball of gas and dust, which is exactly how a very young protoplanet should look," Greaves said in a statement. "The planet will probably take millions of years to settle down into its final form," she said. "So we really are seeing it very early—even a bit like the first cells that make up a human embryo in the womb."

Planetary Trigger

Despite its youth, the developing world is already a healthy size as planets go, Greaves noted. "The protoplanet is about 14 times as massive as Jupiter and is about twice as far from HL Tau as Neptune is from our sun," she said. That means HL Tau b will likely grow into a gas giant resembling a larger version of Jupiter. Greaves' team made the surprise find while studying the protoplanet's parent star using radio telescopes at the Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico and the Jodrell Bank Observatory in England.

Similar Planetary system - Found

Astronomers have discovered a planetary system orbiting a distant star which looks much like our own. They found two planets that were close matches for Jupiter and Saturn orbiting a star about half the size of our Sun.

Martin Dominik, from the St Andrews University, UK, said the finding suggested systems like our own could be much more common than we thought. And he told a major meeting that astronomers were on the brink of finding many more of them.

The St Andrews researcher said this planetary system, and others like it, could host terrestrial planets like Earth. It was just a matter of time before such worlds were detected, he explained. Dr Dominik told BBC News: "We found a system with two planets that take the roles of Jupiter and Saturn in our Solar System. These two planets have a similar mass ratio and similar orbital radius and a similar orbital period.

"It looks like this may have formed in a similar way to our Solar System. And if this is the case, it looks like [our] Solar System cannot be unique in the Universe. There should be other similar systems out there which could host terrestrial planets." Dr Dominik presented his work at the Royal Astronomical Society's National Astronomy Meeting in Belfast.