Scientists discover youngest planet orbiting solar-type star
Astronomers have discovered the youngest planet orbiting a solar-type star outside our solar system, they said today.
The giant planet is 35 million years old and six times the mass of Jupiter.
Named BD+20 1790b and situated 83 light years away from Earth, it is the youngest planet orbiting a star of a similar size to the sun, the astronomers said.
Only one young planet, aged 100 million years, was previously known but the newly-discovered planet is about three times younger, they said.
University of Hertfordshire astronomer Dr Maria-Cruz Galvez-Ortiz, who was among the international team which identified the planet, described it as “an exciting discovery”.
She said: “There are still very few extra-solar planets that have been discovered – only about 420.”
Young stars are usually excluded from planet searches because they have intense magnetic fields that generate a range of phenomena known collectively as stellar activity, including flares and spots.
This can make it difficult to disentangle the signals of planets and activity.
Dr Galvez-Ortiz said: “Overcoming the interference caused by the activity was a major challenge for the team, but with enough data from an array of large telescopes the planet’s signature was revealed.”
Knowledge about early stages of planet evolution is relatively limited, the university said.
It is hoped the detection of young planets will help scientists investigate the early stages of planetary evolution.
BD+20 1790b was discovered using observations made with different telescopes over the past five years.
The team included astronomers from Spain and the US.
The discovery has been published in the 'Astronomy & Astrophysics' journal.
