The shocking image of a giant planet still “in the womb” that would be nine times the mass of Jupiter

Scientists have observed a huge planet approximately nine times the mass of Jupiter at a remarkably early stage of formation, describing it as still in the womb, in a discovery that challenges today's understanding of planetary formation.

The researchers used the Subaru telescope, near the top of a dormant Hawaiian volcano, and the Hubble orbiting space telescope to detect and study the planet called AB Aurigae b, a gas giant that orbits unusually far from its young host star. Gas giants are planets, like the largest in our solar system, Jupiter and Saturn, composed mainly of hydrogen and helium, with swirling gases that surround a smaller solid core.

“We believe it is still at a very early stage of its' birth 'process,” said astrophysicist Thayne Currie of the Subaru Telescope and the Nasa-Ames research center, lead author of the study published Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy. “Evidence suggests that this is the earliest stage of formation ever observed for a gas giant.”

It is embedded in an expansive disk of gas and dust that contains the material that forms the planets and surrounds a star called AB Aurigae. It is located 508 light years from Earth. This star had a fleeting moment of fame when his image appeared in a scene from the 2021 film Don't Look Up.

About 5,000 planets have been identified beyond our solar system, called exoplanets, but this is one of the largest. It is approaching the maximum size to be classified as a planet rather than a brown dwarf, an intermediate body between the planet and the star. It is heated by the gas and dust that falls on it.

Planets in the process of formation, called protoplanets, have been observed around a single star.

Almost all known exoplanets have orbits around their stars within the distance that separates our sun from their farthest planet, Neptune. But this planet orbits three times farther than Neptune from the Sun and 93 times the distance from Earth to the Sun.

Its birth seems to be following a different process than the standard model of planetary formation.

“The conventional thinking is that most, if not all planets, are formed by slow accumulation of solids in a rocky core, and that gas giants go through this phase before the solid nucleus is massive enough to start accumulating gas,” said astronomer and study co-author Olivier Guyon of Subaru telescope and the University of Arizona.

In this scenario, protoplanets embedded in the disk surrounding a young star gradually grow from dust to solid objects the size of rocks and, if this nucleus reaches several times the mass of the Earth, they begin to accumulate gas from the disk.

“This process cannot form giant planets at large orbital distances, so this discovery challenges our understanding of planet formation,” Guyon said.

Instead, researchers believe that AB Aurigae b is forming on a stage where the disk around the star cools and gravity causes it to fragment into one or more massive clusters that form planets.

“There's more than one way to cook an egg,” Currie said. “And apparently there may be more than one way to form a planet similar to Jupiter.”

The star AB Aurigae is about 2.4 times more massive than our sun and almost 60 times brighter. He is approximately 2 million years old, a baby by stellar standards, compared to the approximately 4.5 billion years old of our middle-aged sun. At the beginning of its life, the sun was also surrounded by a disk that gave rise to the Earth and the other planets.

“New astronomical observations continually challenge our current theories and ultimately improve our understanding of the universe,” Guyon said. “The formation of planets is very complex and messy, with many surprises ahead.”

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