NASDAQ:GOOGL 6 September 2025 - 10 September 2025

Planet Birth Caught in the Act: For the first time, astronomers have directly spotted a young planet forming inside the gap of a ringed disk around a sun-like star sciencedaily.com sciencedaily.com. The newborn exoplanet, named WISPIT 2b, was detected using an advanced adaptive optics system on the Magellan Telescope. It appears as a bright dot of H-alpha emission within a cleared gap of dust and gas sciencedaily.com sciencedaily.com – exactly where a “protoplanet” has long been predicted to carve out a gap. “Dozens of theory papers have been written about these disk gaps being caused by protoplanets, but no one’s ever found a definitive one until today,” said University of Arizona astronomer Laird Close, who led the discovery sciencedaily.com. Close called the find a “big deal,” validating that infant planets do produce the dark rings observed in many proto-planetary disks sciencedaily.com. The newly imaged planet WISPIT 2b is about five times Jupiter’s mass and actively accreting gas. Close’s team also spotted a second candidate planet closer to the star. “Once we turned on the adaptive optics system, the planet jumped right out at us… it just popped out,” Close said of the moment they saw the telltale glow of gas