Astronomers have just discovered the youngest planet ever spotted: IRAS 04125+2902 balso called “TIDYE-1b”. She is only 3 million years old. For comparison, our Earth is 4.5 billion years old, or 1,500 times the age of the youngest. Announced in a study published on November 20, 2024 by the journal Nature, this discovery constitutes an opportunity for science.
TIDYE-1b already seems to call into question the models used by scientists to explain the birth of planets, reports Universe Today. Madyson Barber, a researcher at the University of North Carolina and lead author of the study, says: “Astronomy helps us explore our place in the universe, where we came from and where we are going. The discovery of this type of planet therefore allows us to travel in time and gain insight into the formation of planets.”
Madyson Barber discovered TIDYE-1b thanks to transit methodwhich allows a planet to be revealed when it passes in front of its star, by attenuating the light. This is how it was able to be spotted by NASA’s TESS telescope. TIDYE-1b is not the first to have been found using this method, which has already made it possible to detect around ten planets aged between 10 and 40 million years.
This is a rare advance because, under normal circumstances, these young planets are obscured by the gas and dust that make up the protoplanetary diskor the debris field orbiting a star from which new planets form.
The next super-Earth?
TIDYE-1b presents an interesting feature for scientists: “Planets usually form from a flat disk of dust and gas, explains Andrew Mann, associate professor at the University of North Carolina. This explains why the planets in our solar system are lined up like pancakes. However, here the disk is tilted and offset relative to the planet and its star. This challenges our current understanding of planet formation.”
If TIDYE-1b is visible despite its youth, it is not because of its impressive diameter (eleven times that of Earth), but because it orbits its star at an angle different from that of the protoplanetary disk. main.
TIDYE-1b is very close to its star since it takes around nine days to make a complete revolution. Researchers believe that it could eventually become a “super-Earth” or a “sub-Neptune”or types of planets absent from our solar system but which seem common in the Milky Way.
This discovery provides proof that planets can form earlier than we thought. The absence of examples of planets younger than 10 million years therefore does not mean that they do not exist, but simply that they tend to be hidden from our view.
Source: www.slate.fr
