How do planets form? A 'baby Jupiter' hundreds of light-years away offers new clues

By Peter Tuthill, Astrophysicist, University of Sydney
Barnaby Norris, Research fellow, University of Sydney

How do planets form? For many years scientists thought they understood this process by studying the one example we had access to: our own Solar System.

However, the discovery of planets around distant stars in the 1990s made it clear that the picture was much more complicated than we knew.

In new research, we have spotted a hot, Jupiter-like gas giant in the process of forming around a star about 500 light-years from Earth.

This rare babysnap of a planet actually in the process…

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