Discovery of TIDYE-1b challenges planet formation theories
Astronomers have unveiled a groundbreaking discovery: TIDYE-1b, a planet only 3 million years old, has been identified orbiting a young star in the Taurus Molecular Cloud. This extraordinary find, detailed in Nature by a team led by Madyson Barber from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is shaking up conventional theories of planetary formation.
TIDYE-1b is notable not just for its age—it’s among the youngest planets ever observed—but for the unique circumstances of its discovery.
Using NASA’s TESS telescope and the transit method, the team detected the planet due to a rare inclination in its protoplanetary disk.
Typically, young planets remain hidden within these gaseous and dusty structures for millions of years. However, the disk’s tilted alignment enabled astronomers to spot TIDYE-1b earlier than expected.
With a diameter ten times that of Earth and a mass 90 times greater, TIDYE-1b resembles Jupiter in size but is far less dense. It completes an orbit around its star in just nine days, suggesting an exceptionally close proximity.
The discovery not only challenges the idea that planets need at least 10 million years to form but also raises new questions about the interaction between protoplanetary disks and their stars.
Andrew Mann, a co-author of the study, emphasized that findings like this « upend our current understanding of how planets emerge. »
This young planet’s presence is a vivid reminder of the dynamic and evolving processes shaping our universe.
