Alien world spotted – astronomers finally find the baby planet that's carving spirals in a disc around a distant star

Astronomers may have caught a baby planet in the act of being born around a star, sculpting beautiful spiral arms into the dusty disc that surrounds it.

Using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), researchers believe they’ve found a planet forming in real time, deep within a swirl of gas and dust 440 lightyears away.

This newborn exoplanet is twice the size of Jupiter and, as it orbits its star, is leaving giant spiral patterns in its wake.

A peek into planetary origins

The planet-in-the-making was discovered orbiting a young star called HD 135344B.

This star is surrounded by a protoplanetary disc, a massive disc of gas and dust that serves as the raw material for planets.

And right at the base of one of the disc’s grand spiral arms, astronomers spotted something extraordinary: a bright object that looks like a growing exoplanet.

"What makes this detection potentially a turning point is that, unlike many previous observations, we are able to directly detect the signal of the protoplanet, which is still highly embedded in the disc," says Francesco Maio, a doctoral researcher at the University of Florence, Italy, and lead author of the study.

"This gives us a much higher level of confidence in the planet’s existence, as we’re observing the planet’s own light."

Until now, scientists could only infer a new-forming planet’s existence around this star, based on the shapes in these discs.

Now they’ve caught one shining through the dust.

Meet the growing planet

The suspected planet is located as far from its star as Neptune is from our Sun, and is estimated to be around twice Jupiter’s mass.

As the planet sweeps through the disc, it’s pulling material toward itself and sending shockwaves through the gas, carving the sweeping spiral arms astronomers can now see with clarity.

Those spirals were first spotted years ago using an instrument called SPHERE on the VLT, years ago.

But no one had managed to catch the planet thought to be causing them until now, thanks to a newer, sharper tool called on the VLT called the Enhanced Resolution Imager and Spectrograph (ERIS).

This marks the first time astronomers have detected an exoplanet nestled inside a disc spiral, right where they thought it would be.

Another mysterious companion

A second team of astronomers also used ERIS in a separate study, taking a close look at V960 Mon, a star even younger than HD 135344B.

Again, previous studies showed its disc was fragmenting in a chaotic process known as gravitational instability.

This is when chunks of material collapse in on themselves, potentially forming planets or even bigger objects.

With ERIS, the researchers discovered a bright, compact companion lurking near one of the disc’s spiral arms.

It could be a giant planet forming through gravitational instability, or perhaps a brown dwarf, a kind of failed star, too big to be a planet but too small to ignite as a true star.

For astronomers, this is about as close as we’ll ever get to watching planets being born.

"We will never witness the formation of Earth," says Maio. "But here, we may be watching a planet come into existence in real time."