Found: Youngest Planet Ever

The Associated Press reports that Adam Kraus, of the University of Hawaii’s Institute for Astronomy, has discovered the first dust ring around a star forming itself into a planet. The star itself is two million years old and 450 light-years from earth. It is estimated that the dust ring has been forming over the last 50,000 to 100,000 years.

Titled LkCa 15b, this is the youngest planet ever observed, breaking the record of a planet about five times older. This planet was located by Kraus and his colleague Michael Ireland from the Macquarie University and the Australian Astronomical Observatory. They employed the Keck telescopes on Mauna Key.

The light of the star that is forming a planet by gravity is so relatively bright that it has prohibited astronomers from observing any new planets. Kraus and Ireland changed the shape of the mirror to avoid distortions from the earth’s atmosphere. They also put masks over most of the telescope’s mirror. These two techniques together allowed them to observe the faint ring around the star. They had been studying 150 young, dusty stars, which led to a more concentrated study of a dozen of them. The second of those dozen revealed the dust ring of a forming planet.

Summarized from: http://news.yahoo.com/hawaii-astronomer-captures-image-forming-planet-230958310.html