NASA Finds The Youngest Planet Ever And It’s Still Being Born Skip to content ≡ Full View Mode
Artist’s concept depicting Elias 2-24 b – Image: W. M. Keck Observatory/Adam Makarenko Using NASA archives and ground-based observatories, astronomers have discovered Elias 2-24 b, a gas giant under one million years old that has just become the youngest exoplanet ever detected. Located about 450 light-years from Earth within the star-forming ρ Ophiuchi cloud complex, Elias 2-24 b orbits around a young, orange dwarf star. Elias 2-24 b itself is still actively growing; roughly equivalent in mass to Jupiter, this giant offers scientists an extraordinarily rare real-time look at planetary evolution. Elias 2-24 b shatters previous records held by four-way ties among worlds orbiting stars such as PDS 70 and WISPIT 2, all of which are older than five million years. At less than a million years old, Elias 2-24 b was born in a fraction of the time predicted by conventional core-accretion models. Theoretically, building a Jupiter-sized planet should require millions of years for dust grains to coalesce into planetesimals, gradually building up enough gravity to capture surrounding gas. Therefore, with Elias 2-24 b, could this be a hint of missing physics or presence of undiscovered alternative assembly pathways? Astronomers first spotted the gap caused by Elias 2-24 b in 2017 – Image: Bernardi et al. 2026 Spotting the infant planet was challenging all in itself, as it remain embedded in opaque disks of dust and gas. This meant that standard detection methods like transit photometry were largely ineffective. In this case, however, a research team led by Andrea Bernardi of the Universidad Diego Portales combined high-resolution mm-wave observations from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) with direct infrared imaging from the ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT). ALMA data previously mapped a prominent circular gap sculpted into the host star’s protoplanetary disk, while infrared instruments detected a faint, localized point of light situated precisely within that gap. To confirm that this faint source was indeed an orbiting world, the team turned to archival direct-imaging data maintained by the Keck Observatory in Hawaii. By re-analyzing images gathered in 2018 and 2020, the researchers tracked the point of light’s slow motion along its orbital path over time. The motion matched orbital dynamics, establishing that the planet was actively clearing its lane through the dusty debris. Comments Tags: space, NASA, astronomy, planets Aaron Leong
