Astronomers have confirmed the young planet Elias 2-24 b. NASA reported the finding on 16 September and updated its article on 17 September. Researchers estimate that the planet is less than a million years old and has a mass comparable to Jupiter’s.
A clue in the telescope archive
The system lies about 450 light-years from Earth. The planet is growing inside the disc of gas and dust surrounding its star, at a distance from the star roughly 55 times that between Earth and the Sun.
ALMA had previously detected a gap in the disc, and the Very Large Telescope (VLT) spotted a faint point of light there. Andrea Bernardi’s team at Diego Portales University in Chile compared those observations with archival data from Keck Observatory taken in 2018 and 2020. The object’s motion helped confirm its planetary nature.
The study was published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters on 16 September. It gives astronomers an opportunity to test how quickly large planets can form. The object’s age and mass remain estimates based on observations.
