Hubble Telescope Captures Two Million Year Old Jupiter-like Planet

Planet AB Aurigae b, is a young gas giant located about 531 light-years from the Sun, estimated to be about 2 million years old. Dock. NASA, ESA, Joseph Olmsted (STScI)

JAKARTA - The Hubble Space Telescope has reportedly spotted a young Jupiter-like protoplanet that is very unusual in its planet formation.

Dubbed the planet AB Aurigae b, it is a young gas giant located about 531 light-years from the Sun, estimated to be about 2 million years old. Scientists know that gaseous and rocky planets like these are formed from material that gathers around a star called a stellar disk.

But AB Aurigae b seems to challenge the old theory about the mechanism of planet formation because of their quite different sizes and locations.

According to the scientists who discovered this exoplanet, it appears that AB Aurigae b supports the theory of unusual planet formation, known as disk instability or described as intense and violent.

AB Aurigae b orbits its star at a distance of 8.6 billion miles, which is more than twice the distance of Pluto from the Sun. Given that distance, scientists estimate a planet like this would take a very long time to form.

However, this protoplanet is already nine times larger than Jupiter, and at a very young age. Scientists believe that the planet was only possible through a different method called the disk instability approach.

"This approach is a top-down model in which as the large disk around the star cools, gravity causes the disk to rapidly break apart into one or more planet-mass fragments," the scientists said.

To arrive at a conclusion about formation, the scientists compared data from the Hubble image of AB Aurigae b with data from the ground-based planetary imaging instrument SCExAO on the Japan Subaru Telescope in Hawaii.

"The wealth of data from space and ground-based telescopes is proving important, as distinguishing between infant planets and complex disc features unrelated to planets is extremely difficult," the scientists said.

In fact, it wasn't just the latest Hubble images used in the study, lead researcher Thayne Currie of the Subaru Telescope and Eureka Scientific noted that Hubble's archival data was critical to the findings.

"We can't detect this motion on the order of one or two years. Hubble provides a time base, combined with Subaru data, for 13 years, which is sufficient to detect orbital motion," said Currie.

With so much data from the two instruments, scientists can confirm the accretion theory of the planet's core, although further observations are likely to be made using the James Webb Space Telescope once it becomes operational later this year.