The Universe Is Expecting Two Or Three New Baby Planets: Scientists welcome LkCA 15b, 15c and (maybe) 15d! Orbiting around a sun-like star 430 light-years away, scientists at University of Arizona (UA) say they’ve found two (maybe three) planets. This is the first time they’ve ever been able to see such young, newly-formed planets do their thing, according to a study in Nature.“While nearly 1,900 exoplanets have now been discovered and confirmed, none are still in the process of formation,” the study states. “… We are unambiguously witnessing planet formation.”
While grown-up planets (like the eight in our solar system) are large enough to detect because they can dim the light of their stars as they pass in front, these little babies are still too small for that. That’s why scientists have instead resorted to telescopes. Through that super powerful lens, they were able to observe this circumstellar disk (a ringfull of dust and gas that scientists believe planets form inside) and spotted two objects, roughly 5 to 10 times the size of Jupiter, that were moving in orbits around the star — calling them LkCA 15b and LkCa 15c. LkCA 15b is closer to the star — 15 times as far from the star as is earth is to our sun — and is a bit faster than it’s sister planet which is 17 times as far. A third object that may be another baby planet — which they’ve dubbed LkCa 15d — has also been identified. But they aren’t sure yet. What’s super exciting about this find is that scientists have unparalleled opportunity to watch adolescent planets — and this front row seat to planet puberty will give us access to so much more information about our own solar system.
“This would potentially allow the distribution and occurrence of young planets to be determined with a comparable accuracy to that for the mature exoplanets discovered by the Kepler satellite,” Astrophysicist at Princeton University Zhaohuan Zhu wrote in an essay published with the study. “Such an understanding of the young planet population will shed light on the decades-old problem of planet formation, and reveal how young planetary systems can evolve into older ones, such as our solar system, billions of years after they were born.
Katherine Speller
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