NASA Mission Discovers Planet Younger Than Dinosaurs

NASA's Kepler mission has detected the youngest known planet outside the Solar System. Called K2-33b, the extrasolar planet is reportedly 5 to 10 million years old and located 500 light years away from us. The exoplanet's age might sound a lot in terms of human timelines, however it is a newborn baby when compared to our 4.5 billion years old Earth, or the 14 billion years old Universe. In fact, the K2-33b is younger than the dinosaurs, having formed nearly 55 to 60 million years after the extinction of the huge beasts. In short, when a T.rex was baring its fangs at a Triceratops, the K2-33b was probably nowhere in the picture of the Universe. Food for thought that!

Youngest ever fully formed planet, a bit larger than Neptune, discovered around distant star https://t.co/J7QlnzxFCe pic.twitter.com/urDDkYbBdB

— NASA (@NASA) June 20, 2016

The American space agency's Kepler spacecraft, which aims at discovering new and possibly habitable planets, detected the infant planet with the transit method which picks up the slight dimness of a host star when its exoplanet orbits it. The subsequent steps, such as observing Kepler's measurements of the planet and follow up information gathered from Hawaii's W. M. Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea, helped astronomers to find that the planet is a bit bigger in size than Neptune. The exoplanet is located 10 times nearer to its parent star compared to the distance between Mercury and Sun, consequently its orbit time is also less at 5 Earth days.

The close orbit of K2-33b has, however, left astronomers puzzled because it is generally theorized that big exoplanets that orbit their parent stars this closely had not, in fact, formed there in the first place. Scientists believe that close orbits expose a planet to exceeding hot temperatures that could affect its formation and shape, therefore the prevalent thought is that such exoplanets migrated from a farther distance in the orbit to their present close ones, taking hundreds of millions of years to complete the shift. The discovery of a new planet forming so close its sun therefore contradicts the theory held until now.

To explain the baffling phenomenon, scientists have come up with two theories, either K2-33b migrated in a shorter duration of time spanning just about hundreds of thousands of years or it formed in situ, i.e. right where it is located now. Irrespective of which option led to its formation, discovering such a baby exoplanet is rare and can help astronomers know more about the intricacies of planetary formation.

"It is extremely rare to find a planet at this stage of its infancy, and gives us a unique opportunity to try and understand more about how all planets form and develop, including Earth," said Dr Sasha Hinkley, researching astronomer from UK's University of Exeter. "In the same way that a person's development is more easily understood if you can study them from being a baby, through childhood and into adulthood, so our understanding of the planets will only increase by learning more about them during their early existence".