University of North Carolina graduate student Madyson Barber spent three years scanning the universe for newborn planets one star cluster at a time, and her persistence paid off when she identified the youngest transiting planet ever discovered, a Jupiter sized world named TIDYE-1b that is only 3 million years old. To put that age into perspective, if Earth were a 50 year old person, this baby planet would be a 2 week old infant, making it an incredibly rare find since astronomers have struggled to spot planets younger than 10 million years due to thick view blocking dust disks surrounding newborn stars. Barber found the planet under the direction of UNC Chapel Hill associate professor Andrew Mann while working in his Young Worlds Lab, and their groundbreaking discovery was published in the international science journal Nature with 38 authors listing Barber and Mann as the lead researchers. The team discovered TIDYE-1b by watching for repeated dips in a star’s brightness, which happens when a planet passes in front of its star and blocks some of the light, but what makes this particular system truly bizarre is that the planet’s disk is misaligned by more than 60 degrees from where it should be.
Every astronomer who looks at the misalignment immediately thinks something weird happened because basic physics says the star, planet and disk should all line up perfectly, yet somehow this baby planet broke all the normal rules of planetary formation. Barber is now planning a trip to the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii for further observations and has proposed using the James Webb Space Telescope to unlock more mysteries about how TIDYE-1b formed in such an unusual configuration. Studying young planets like this 3 million year old infant is essential to understanding how planets form and evolve over billions of years, and Barber’s discovery proves that astronomers should be actively searching for more of these rare baby worlds to draw even bigger conclusions about our universe.
Source: https://www.unc.edu/discover/graduate-student-discovers-youngest-transiting-planet-ever/
