For the First Time Ever, Astronomers Captured the Birth of a Planet in a Cosmic Gap

The WISPIT 2 system as seen by the Magellan Telescope in Chile and the Large Binocular Telescope in Arizona. The protoplanet WISPIT 2b appears as a purple dot in a dust-free gap between a bright, white dust ring around the star and a fainter, outer ring, orbiting at about 56 times the average distance between the Earth and the sun. The other potential planet, CC1, appears as the red object inside the dust free cavity and is estimated to be about 15 Earth-sun distances from its host star. Credit: Laird Close

Astronomers have done something we've never seen before: they took a picture of a planet being born in a gap in cosmic dust.

Introducing WISPIT 2b, a large protoplanet forming ~56 times farther from its star than Earth is from the Sun. It was identified inside an actual gap in a multi-ringed protoplanetary disk (not a simulation) using a crazy array of telescopes and adaptive optics (in this case MagAO-X on the Magellan Telescope in Chile) to confront the cosmic dust. Without that level of technology, we probably would have passed right by it.

Scientists had previously suspected that these "gaps" in the rings of dust surrounding young stars were likely the locations of planets forming but this is the first visual confirmation of what appeared to be forming in this exact region.

Even cooler? There is another possible planet moving in a closer orbit (CC1), and the entire system looks like a younger version of Jupiter and Saturn, but 5,000 times younger.

This provides confirmation that these gaps are not just empty spaces in the protoplanetary disk—they are planet-formation regions, only like what formed our own solar system 4.5 billion years ago.

The image is simply a little purple dot, shining like a cosmic dust skillet. Still wild.

References:
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/adf7a5

https://news.arizona.edu/news/growing-baby-planet-photographed-first-time-ring-darkness