The universe is no place for an infant world.
The teams discovery is detailed in apaperpublished inNature,and challenges current theories of how planets form.
The young alien world is about the same age as its parent star.
An illustration of the baby planet and its warped debris disk.Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt, K. Miller (Caltech/IPAC)
It circles its star at a close distance, completing one full orbit in just under nine days.
In time, the planet could become a gaseous mini-Neptune or a rocky super-Earth, according to the paper.
The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) spotted the baby planet in November 2019.
The star systems misaligned disk remains a mystery.
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