Detecting the youngest alien planet

Recently, astronomers have discovered a youngest extraterrestrial planet orbiting a star 500 light-years from our Earth, called K2-33b.

By observing through the space telescope Kepler and Hubble, astronomers have identified more than 3,000 extraterrestrial planets orbiting stars hundreds of light years from Earth. Most of these planets belong to stars of about 1 billion years or more.

Extraterrestrial k2-33b is very close to its parent star.

While exoplanet studies have revealed a great deal about their evolution, the emergence of young planets like K2-33b has made astronomers discover a lot of mysterious information about stages. The beginning of the formation of planets in the universe.

"Our Earth is about 4.5 billion years old. By comparison, planet K2-33b is very young. You can think of it as a child , " Trevor David, of Caltech , Pasadena, the study's lead author, said. David is a bachelor student working with astronomer Lynne Hillenbrand, also at Caltech.

It is estimated that K2-33b is larger than Neptune, but this difference is not much. The planet is only about 5 to 10 million years old, so it is considered the youngest planet discovered so far. The data collected by the Earth and the space observatory reveal that this extraterrestrial orbit is very close to its parent star. This distance is only 1/10 of the distance between the Sun and Mercury.

The trajectory of K2-33b compared to Mercury.

This is a trait that is inconsistent with the current theories about planet formation because it is normal for astronomers to assume that a young planet like K2-33b should be formed at a position far from the star. it's Mother.

According to astronomers, the older outer planets will take hundreds of millions of years to travel from orbit farther to closer orbit, thus unable to explain the orbit of an action. young like K2-33b.

This discovery was published online in the journal Nature.