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© NASA/JPL-Caltech/ adapted by Kritish Kariman
Only 2 million years old, equivalent to barely a week on a human scale, this is a planet that weighs 3.6 times that of Jupiter with an orbital period around the star of 25 days. Such giant planets orbiting their host star in only a few days are called "Hot Jupiters" due to the intense flux of radiation they receive from proximity to their star. This is the youngest planet of this type, still in the stage of formation, discovered to date.
This discovery results from the use of several state-of-the-art observation techniques simultaneously. First, high-resolution spectroscopy obtained at the Canada-France-Hawaii telescope located at an altitude of 13,779 feet (about 4200 meters) at the summit of Maunakea (Hawaii, USA), which allows detection of the star's movement caused by the planet in its orbital motion.
Next, the multi-wavelength photometry conducted with the Las Cumbres Observatory telescope network spread in longitude across the Earth's surface, and ultra-high-precision space-based photometry with the Kepler satellite, both allow detection of variations in the central star's brightness modulated by the planetary orbit.
This result particularly demonstrates that massive planets can form over very short timescales in the gas and dust disk surrounding nascent stars and then quickly migrate towards the central star on increasingly tight orbits before the disk dissipates within a few million years. The study thus sheds new light on the complex process of planet formation and evolution in young stellar systems.
Reference:
Manick, R., Sousa, A., Bouvier, J., et al. Long period modulation of the classical T Tauri star CI Tau: evidence for an eccentric close-in massive planet at 0.17 au (2024) Astronomy & Astrophysics.