A "baby" exoplanet recently spotted relatively near to Earth is the youngest alien world ever seen, a new study suggests. Researchers say the rare sighting is linked to a mysteriously wonky proplanetary disk around the exoplanet's host star.
The newly discovered exoplanet, known as IRAS 04125+2902 b or TIDYE-1b, is a lightweight gas giant with a diameter slightly smaller than Jupiter's but around 0.4 times the mass of the solar system's largest planet. It orbits a protostar — a baby star still growing to its final size — located in the Taurus molecular cloud around 520 light-years from Earth and completes one rotation around the protostar every 8.8 days.
