Planet WISPIT 2b in Aquila | European Southern Observatory [AI Narration]

Planet WISPIT 2b in Aquila | European Southern Observatory [AI Narration]

What is that yellow spot? It is a young planet outside our Solar System. This image from the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile surprisingly captures a distant scene much like our own Solar System's birth, around 4.5 billion years ago. Although we cannot look into the past and see Earth's formation directly, telescopes let us watch similar processes unfolding around distant stars. At the center of this frame lies a young Sun-like star, hidden behind a coronagraph that blocks its bright glare. Surrounding the star is a bright, dusty protoplanetary disk—the raw material of planets. Gaps and concentric rings mark where a newborn world is gathering gas and dust under its gravity, clearing the way as it orbits the star. Although astronomers have imaged disk-embedded planets before, this is the first-ever observation of an exoplanet actively carving a gap within a disk—the earliest direct glimpse of planetary sculpting in action.

The image shows white protoplanetary disc at the center of the picture taking up most of the frame. The elliptical cloud of dust and gas consists of gaps creating a ring-like structure to the cloud. In of the larger gaps/rings a little dot, in this case a planet is visible. It has accumulated the dust in its orbit and hence created the ring-shaped gap.

What appears to be a ripple in space is this picture depicts a newborn planet eating its way through its dusty cradle as it orbits its host star. This image, taken with the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile, is the first clear detection of a baby planet in a disc with multiple rings. 

These so-called protoplanetary discs surround young stars and appear as disc-shaped structures of gas and dust, often with rings like the one in this image. They are the birthplace of planets, and the rings are thought to indicate the presence of (hungry) planets in the disc. Initially, little particles in the spinning disc begin to accumulate and grow as gravity takes over, stealing more material from the native disc until they evolve into embryo planets. 

The clear detection of the planet WISPIT 2b in this image is an important step forward in our understanding of how planets form. It is about 5 times the mass of Jupiter, and its host star is a younger version of our Sun. It also reinforces the idea that gaps can be created by newly formed planets—a prediction only made in theory that has now been verified observationally.  

While looking for stars hosting young planets, the team of researchers were lucky enough to find a planet so young that is still embedded in its birth disc. This discovery was published in a paper led by Richelle van Capelleveen at the University of Leiden, Netherlands, in collaboration with an international team of astronomers from the University of Galway and the University of Arizona. It was made possible through the precise observations of the planet-hunting SPHERE instrument on the VLT. SPHERE blocks the light of the central star and corrects atmospheric turbulence with adaptive optics, delivering crisp images of the surroundings of the star. The University of Arizona's MagAO-X AO system on the 6.5m Magellan telescope in Chile detected hydrogen gas falling onto the planet, confirming that it is accreting matter from its surroundings. Further observations of this system might reveal new insights about how our own Solar System may have looked in its early days. 

Credit: ESO/R. F. van Capelleveen et al.
Duration: 1 minute, 45 seconds
Release Date: Aug. 26, 2025

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