This Baby Planet Is Already as Massive as Jupiter. It's Not Even a Million Years Old.

Somewhere 450 light-years away, a planet roughly as heavy as Jupiter is still feeding on the cloud of gas and dust that built it. Elias 2-24 b is less than a million years old, and apparently as hungry as a newborn.

Astronomers have confirmed it as the youngest known planet. The previous record holders, four planets circling two other stars, are all more than 5 million years old. This one is still sitting in the disk around its young star, pulling in material and growing.

That's where things get strange. Current models say building a Jupiter-size planet at Jupiter's distance from the sun takes about 5 million years, and longer the farther out you go. Elias 2-24 b orbits about 55 times farther from its star than Earth does from the sun. It got enormous anyway, in a fraction of the time.

Even the Jupiter comparison is an estimate. Astronomers infer the planet's mass from its glow, and for a world this young, that translation leans on assumptions about how it is growing.

The planet had been hiding in plain sight for about a decade. The ALMA radio telescope array in Chile spotted a gap in the star's dusty disk, and the Very Large Telescope later caught a faint point of light inside it. Astronomers argued over whether it could really be a planet. The answer was sitting in Keck Observatory's archive: images from 2018 and 2020 that, reanalyzed years later, showed the object moving like a planet rather than a glitch or a background star.

It seems to be growing exactly the way theory says giant planets grow. It just got there at least five times too fast.

Read the full story at NASA Science, September 16, 2026

Hot Take: Planet-formation models were built almost entirely from planets old enough to be easy to spot, so the first clear baby picture was always going to be trouble. That's what happens when you study childhood by interviewing only grown-ups.