The celestial body is the youngest transiting planet found to date.
Madyson Barber, a graduate student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, was working on her thesis when she made the discovery.
Barber used data from NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite to observe the brightness of stars over time. During the observations, Barber noticed some "little dips" in brightness, indicating that a "transiting" planet may be passing near Earth.The planet, named IRAS 04125+2902 b, is estimated to be 3 million years old, which is considered "young" for planets, Barber said. Earth is about 4.
Nicknamed "TIDYE-1b" by researchers, the new planet has been shown to have an orbital period of 8.83 days, according to a paper published Thursday in Nature. It has a radius about 10.7 times larger than Earth and has approximately 30% of the mass of Jupiter.Astronomers noted some unusual characteristics of the star, which is located relatively close to Earth at 160 parsecs, or 522 lightyears, away, researchers said.
"Because we don't have a ton of these young transiting systems that we know of, it's really important that we look for more so that we can have a better picture of what that formation and evolution looks like, so we can better understand how our own home formed and evolved," Barber said.
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