{"id":32247,"date":"2025-08-30T05:17:07","date_gmt":"2025-08-30T05:17:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/32247\/"},"modified":"2025-08-30T05:17:07","modified_gmt":"2025-08-30T05:17:07","slug":"why-all-the-excitement-about-a-baby-planet-discovered-by-irish-scientists-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/32247\/","title":{"rendered":"Why all the excitement about a baby planet discovered by Irish scientists? \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>What have scientists at the University of Galway discovered this week? <\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">They have found a baby exoplanet \u2013 a baby in chronological terms, but not in terms of size. <\/p>\n<p>What is an exoplanet? <\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">An exoplanet is a planet orbiting around another sun. They were first discovered in 1995. Since then thousands of them have been detected. There are countless billions of them in the universe. The holy grail for astronomers is to find a planet like our own in the so-called \u201cGoldilocks zone\u201d, where it is neither too hot nor too cold for life. <\/p>\n<p>What have the scientists found? <\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">The romantically named WISPIT 2b was discovered orbiting a new star 430 light years away in the constellation of Aquila. WISPIT 2 is a young star, which has just been formed. <\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">Astronomers know this because it is surrounded by a multiringed disk known as a protoplanetary disk. This is material left over after a star is formed. The planets in our solar system emerged from the birth of our sun six billion years ago. <\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">The significance of this discovery is that astronomers were able to see within this disk a planet being formed. The planet in question is a gas giant like our Jupiter or Saturn, but is many times bigger. The astronomers liken the discovery to a prehistoric time machine where one can watch the birth of a solar system like our own. <\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph b-it-article-body__interstitial-link\">[\u00a0<a aria-label=\"Open related story\" class=\"c-link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.irishtimes.com\/science\/space\/2025\/08\/26\/university-of-galway-researchers-co-lead-discovery-of-new-planet\/\" rel=\"noreferrer nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">New \u2018exceptionally beautiful\u2019 planet discovered by Irish astronomersOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n<p>How was it discovered? <\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">Observing exoplanets is exceptionally difficult. They emit no light of their own and can usually only be detected by blocking out the light from the sun around it. <\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">The ground-breaking discovery was made using one of the world\u2019s most advanced observatories \u2013 the European Southern Observatory\u2019s Very Large Telescope (ESO\u2019s VLT) in the Atacama Desert in Chile.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">The teams at Galway, Leiden University in the Netherlands and the University of Arizona took multiple photographs of the star in question to see if they could detect light reflecting from an exoplanet. <\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">Instead they found the multiringed, multicoloured dust disk. The disk is huge stretching to 380 astronomical units (380 times the distance of the Earth from the Sun) or 5.7 trillion kilometres. <\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">The astronomy world was amazed as this phenomenon had been detected but never seen before. <\/p>\n<p>How have astronomers reacted? <\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">Chloe Lawlor, a doctoral student at the University of Galway, summed up the excitement: \u201cWISPIT 2b, with its position within its birth disk, is a beautiful example of a planet that can be used to explore current planet formation models. I am certain this will become a landmark paper.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">The planet was captured in near infrared light \u2013 the type of view that someone would see when using night-vision goggles \u2013 as it is still glowing and hot after its initial formation phase.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"What have scientists at the University of Galway discovered this week? They have found a baby exoplanet \u2013&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":32248,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[77],"tags":[18,19,17,133,22918],"class_list":{"0":"post-32247","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-science","8":"tag-eire","9":"tag-ie","10":"tag-ireland","11":"tag-science","12":"tag-wispit-2"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32247","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32247"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32247\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/32248"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32247"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32247"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32247"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}