Researchers Accidentally Discover Possible 'Toddler' Planet

Science isn’t always, well, an exact science: Some breakthroughs are nothing more than a crazy, random happenstance.

Like the toddler planet spotted by astronomers on the edge of the young double star CS Cha.

While examining the dust disc around CS Cha, the cosmologists saw a small dot on the edge of their images. That speck turned out to be a small planet only a few million years young, moving along with the binary star.

According to the international group, headed by Dutch researchers from Leiden University, CS Cha and its “special companion” are suspended about 600 light years away from Earth, in the constellation Chameleon.

A T Tauri star formed only two to three million years ago; CS Cha is the subject of study by astronomers searching for a dust disc and planets in the making.

This is exactly what the team stumbled upon early last year while using the Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast Exoplanet REsearch (SPHERE) tool on Chile’s Very Large Telescope.

In blue, it is viewed with special polarization filters that make dust discs and exoplanets visible (via Christian Ginski/SPHERE)

With a little help from the telescope archives, researchers discovered the same dot (albeit much fainter) in photos taken 19 years ago with the Hubble Space Telescope and 11 years ago with the Very Large Telescope.

“Thanks to the old photographs, the astronomers were able to show that the companion moves with the binary and that they belong together,” a Leiden University press release said.

No further details have been revealed; scientists have not yet determined what the companion looks like or how it was formed.

“We suspect that [it] is surrounded by its own dust disc,” lead study author Christian Ginski said in a statement. “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,” he continued. “The classical planet-forming-models can’t help us.”

Moving forward, researchers hope to examine the star and its companion in more detail using the international ALMA telescope on the Chajnantor plateau in the North Chilean Andes.

The full study will be published soon by the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

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