Astronomers found the youngest exoplanet ever detected, solving a decade-old mystery

Astronomers confirmed Elias 2-24 b, the youngest exoplanet ever detected at less than a million years old, still actively gathering material from the disk around its young host star, about 450 light-years away. The discovery solved a decade-old mystery — a faint point of light spotted by the Very Large Telescope inside a gap in the star's disk, long debated as either a planet or an anomaly. Researchers confirmed it using archived Keck Observatory data from 2018 and 2020, tracking its motion to prove it was a real, forming planet. NASA released an artist's animation depicting the planet actively accreting material from the disk within the gap it carved. The find breaks the previous record by more than 4 million years, and researchers say NASA's newly launched Roman Space Telescope should make discoveries like this significantly easier going forward. Credit: W. M. Keck Observatory/Adam Makarenko