A group of researchers from Rochester Institute of Technology has discovered a newborn massive planet that is closer to Earth than any other similar planets of young age discovered.
The baby giant planet named 2MASS 1155-7919 b, is about 330 light years from the solar system and is located in Epsilon Chamaeleontis Association. The finding has been published in the Research Notes of the American Astronomical Society.
Lead author Annie Dickson Vandervelde said that the planet that they had come across is very young and has only ten times the mass of Jupiter. This shows that this planet is an infant one and is still in the process of formation. He was quoted as saying that lots of planets have been discovered using Kepler mission and other missions but all of them were old ones. The scientists had discovered the new planet by using the data from the Gaia space observatory.
It has been said that the giant baby planet is orbiting a star which is only about five million years old (one thousand times younger than Sun). In the discovery, the researchers also said that the baby giant planet orbits its sun at 600 times the distance of the Earth to Sun.
