The youngest exoplanet found by the Hubble telescope is the size of Jupiter (and still growing)

[Seldom Bucket]

The Hubble Space Telescope has peered out into the cosmos and spotted its youngest exoplanet yet, a giant world 379 light-years from Earth that's still growing.

Planets form as dust and gas, swirling around in a circumstellar disk surrounding their star, collides and condenses to slowly become a "ball." Far out in the constellation Centaurus, Hubble has spotted a planet still coming together. The young gas giant exoplanet, designated PDS 70b, is "just" 5 million years old, Hubble scientists said. While the planet is still gathering mass, pulling it from the young star it orbits, it's already huge — roughly the size of Jupiter.

In a new study, scientists took advantage of this unique opportunity to study a planet in its formative years like PDS 70b with Hubble's telescope eye. .

"This system is so exciting because we can witness the formation of a planet," co-author Yifan Zhou, also of the University of Texas at Austin, said in a statement. "This is the youngest bona fide planet Hubble has ever directly imaged."

The youngest exoplanet found by the Hubble telescope is the size of Jupiter (and still growing)

The Hubble Space Telescope peered out into the cosmos, 379 light-years from Earth, and spotted a giant planet forming, the youngest planet ever spotted by the space telescope.

www.space.com

 

[JacobCooper45]

That's why I adore telescopes, imagers, and everything related to it. They let us see planets and galaxies that are far away and even don't exist. Now I keep an eye on all companies that participate in building such telescopes as Hubble, James Webb, etc., I also try to stay aware of new participants of this space race. This optical payload manufacturer has all the chances to become one of the leading imager manufacturers in space engineering. Has someone heard about this company before?