Astronomers have confirmed a giant planet designated Elias 2-24b that they say is the youngest exoplanet detected to date, still gathering material from the gas-and-dust disk around its host star in the Ophiuchus star-forming region, according to W. M. Keck Observatory (opens in new tab) and Sci.News (opens in new tab) coverage of a paper in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Keck said the system lies roughly 454 light-years from Earth and is estimated at no more than about 1 million years old, younger than previously highlighted directly imaged protoplanets around PDS 70 and WISPIT 2, which Sci.News (opens in new tab) cited as roughly 5 million years old. Lead author Andrea Bernardi of Diego Portales University said the planet’s youth and ongoing accretion let researchers observe a rarely seen formation stage.
The confirmation combines 2018 and later Keck/NIRC2 vortex coronagraph observations reanalyzed from the Keck Observatory Archive with supporting ALMA and ESO Very Large Telescope data. Sci.News (opens in new tab) reported a mass estimate between about 1.9 and 4 times Jupiter’s based on brightness and evolutionary models. Co-author Lucas Cieza said earlier record holders already strained formation models and that Elias 2-24b shows important processes are still missing from those models.
Researchers say the planet sits in a narrow disk gap first noted with ALMA about a decade ago, strengthening the link between such gaps and forming planets and supporting a core-accretion growth phase rather than a sudden gravitational-collapse pathway. Keck Chief Scientist John O’Meara highlighted the value of archival data revisited with newer techniques. Follow-up spectroscopy to refine mass, temperature, and accretion is planned; absolute mass remains model-dependent.