In a new discovery in space, astronomers took an “exciting” step forward in understanding how planets are formed, after a new giant planet was detected orbiting an infant sun last month.

The first of its kind, Canadian Space Agency program scientist Denis Laurin believes that this discovery has debunked knowledge of most hot Jupiters — massive planets whose years are substantially shorter than Earth’s.

Those planets are thought to “have gone closer to their stars due to gravitation, which takes billions of years, but this young exoplanet was birthed next to a young star,” he said. “This brings our assumption of exoplanets back to zero with this new discovery.”

The exoplanet, also known as a hot Jupiter for its similarities in mass and width to our own solar system’s planet Jupiter, is the youngest fully formed planet ever recorded.

“This is more than surprising, it is exciting, because it’s a baby planet around a baby star,” Elodie Hébrard, a York post-doctoral fellow and one of the researchers in this discovery, told the Star. “Our discovery reveals that a giant planet can not only form quickly, but also end up extremely close to its sun soon after the star itself is born.”

Just bigger than the size of Neptune, the planet named K2-33b whips around the star every five days.

Giant planets, like Jupiter, were thought to be unable to form so close to a star due to the lack of suitable material there, she explained. However, K2-33b is showing another side to the case, especially being only two million years old — the equivalent of a week-old human baby.

The team used four different instruments mounted on telescopes located atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii, the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope atop Pic-du-Midi in France, the Télescope Bernard Lyot in the French Pyrénées, and Gemini-North in Hawaii. The giant planet had been found in the first two months of observation, as it orbited around its host star at a distance only one-20th of the distance between the Sun to the Earth.

“What’s more, the presence of a close-in giant planet so early in a star’s life is likely to have a profound influence on smaller, terrestrial planets that might form in its vicinity,” Hébrard said.

In our own solar system, rockier planets like Earth or Mars are much closer to the sun in comparison to the gas giants like Saturn, which makes this hot Jupiter another mystery, Hébrard explains.

“Our discovery reveals that a giant planet can not only form quickly, but also end up extremely close to its sun soon after the star itself is born,” Hébrard said.

With this research, Hébrard believes that’ll it will pave the way to understanding more about planetary function.

“It’s pretty exciting to be able to look directly at the planet formation,” she said. “The discovery has made the experience richer.”

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The CSA is currently developing two instruments for NASA’s James Webb Space telescope coming in 2018. Laurin says that these two key tools will help with understanding the hot Jupiters more closely.

The first instrument is a Future Guidance Sensor, which will is “critical for the Webb’s ability to ‘see,’ ” Laurin explains. It will help determine its position, and steer the overall guidance of the telescope. Secondly, the NIRISS, Near-Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph, will have the unique capabilities to find the most distant of objects.

“It will be able to peer through the glare of nearby young stars to unveil new Jupiter-like exoplanets,” Laurin says. This will also allow for astronomers to have a better grasp on the chemical makeup of these giant planets — how much oxygen or methane is on the planet, which will overall provide information on signs of life.”