Key Points
- Scientists discovered a giant planet, up to 10 times the size of Jupiter, around a young star.
- The planet was found by combining data from two different tools: the ALMA telescope and the Gaia space mission.
- One team found gaps in the star’s dust disk, which is a sign of a planet forming.
- Another team noticed the star itself was “wobbling,” another key sign of a planet’s gravity.
Astronomers have discovered a giant planet, up to ten times the size of Jupiter, hiding in a swirling cloud of gas and dust around a young star. At first, scientists thought the star, named MP Mus, was all alone. But a closer look revealed it has a massive companion.
Published in the journal Nature Astronomy, the discovery happened when two different teams of scientists combined their work. One team used the powerful ALMA telescope to look at the pancake-like disk of dust where planets are born. Their first observation showed a “boring,” flat disk.
But when they looked again with a different wavelength that could see deeper, they found gaps and a cavity—tell-tale signs that a planet was clearing a path through the dust.
At the same time, another researcher was using data from the Gaia space mission and found something else: the star itself was “wobbling.” A star wobbling is a classic sign that the gravity of a large, orbiting planet is pulling on it.
When the two teams compared their findings, they realized the planet causing the wobble was in the same place as the gaps in the disk, confirming the discovery.
This is the first time scientists have found a young planet this way, by combining observations of a star’s wobble with deep scans of its dust disk. The breakthrough suggests there could be many more hidden planets out there that we haven’t been able to see with just one method. By finding these young worlds, scientists can learn more about how planets, including Earth, form.
