A new, still forming, “toddler planet” has been found entirely by chance

Astronomers have spotted a “toddler planet” in the early throes of its life as it orbits a young double star 600 light years away from Earth.

The planet was found almost by accident as an international research team headed by astronomers at Leiden University glimpsed it while observing double star CS Cha. Observable from the southern hemisphere as part of the Chameleon constellation, little is known about the still-forming planet.

More details and findings around the planet will be published soon in the Astronomy & Astrophysics journal. However, the research team did look back through archives to see if this planet has been observable in the past. Looking through photos taken from the Hubble Space Telescope, the team found images from 19 years ago and again eight years later in photos taken by the Very Large Telescope.2

Presumably dismissed as just some dust at the time of production, the older images – along with the team’s most recent finding – suggests that the dot is moving in tandem with the binary star system CS Cha.

The team first encountered the toddler planet as they attempted to delve deeper into the two or three-million-year old CS Cha star system to uncover more about how planets are born. Even now, it’s still not known quite how planets form, so the team’s research could be incredibly valuable in understanding where we could find life elsewhere in the universe.

It’s not clear if the toddler planet is actually a planet or simply another small brown dwarf star, but the team believe it has the potential to be a gas giant bigger than Jupiter.

“The most exciting part is that the light of the companion is highly polarised,” explained Christian Ginski, lead author on the paper. “Such a preference in the direction of polarisation usually occurs when light is scattered along the way. We suspect that the companion is surrounded by his own dust disc.

"The tricky part is that the disc blocks a large part of the light and that is why we can hardly determine the mass of the companion. So it could be a brown dwarf but also a super-Jupiter in his toddler years.

“The classical planet-forming-models can't help us."

If you’re wondering just how far away this baby planet is, and if you’ll even be able to see it for yourselves, 600 light years is quite a distance. Our nearest star cluster, Alpha Centauri can be viewed with a telescope, but it’s also only a paltry 4.37 light years away from us. CS Cha is over 130 times further away – so looks like you’ll be relying on the astronomers to find this one out for us.

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