Mateusz Kaczmarek

A Planet Is Born: In a feat long thought nearly impossible, astronomers have directly imaged a planet in the act of forming. Using the ESO’s Very Large Telescope in Chile, a team snapped a clear picture of WISPIT 2b, a gas giant about five times Jupiter’s mass, carving out a gap in the multi-ringed disk of a young Sun-like star ts2.tech ts2.tech. The baby planet glows red-hot as it accumulates gas. “Discovering this planet… was an amazing experience — we were incredibly lucky,” said Dr. Richelle van Capelleveen of Leiden Observatory, a co-leader of the discovery ts2.tech. WISPIT 2b’s host star is only ~5 million years old and part of an unexpected stellar group, making its spectacular concentric disk a surprise find ts2.tech. Once the team spotted the disk’s rings, they quickly followed up and found the planet nestled in one of the gaps, confirming the planet’s orbit around the star ts2.tech. This marks the first unambiguous image of a protoplanet in a multi-ring disk – offering a unique “lab” for studying how newborn planets interact with their birth disks. As one co-author put it, “WISPIT 2b… is a remarkable discovery” that will serve as a benchmark for planet-formation theories