A newborn planet barely out of its stellar nursery is now the youngest exoplanet ever confirmed.
Astronomers have confirmed Elias 2-24b, a planet under 1 million years old, making it the youngest exoplanet ever directly observed. The star it orbits is young enough to still be wrapped in the disk of gas and dust it formed from, rather than sitting in a mature, settled system. At under a million years old, the planet is a cosmic infant - for comparison, our own solar system is roughly 4.6 billion years old. The confirmation effectively catches a planet mid-assembly, rather than long after formation finished.
Planet formation theories generally assume disks need a few million years to coalesce gas and dust into a full-sized planet. A confirmed planet this young tightens that timeline considerably, and could strengthen the case for faster-acting formation routes over slower, grain-by-grain buildup. It is a useful reality check for models built mostly from systems where the early, messy years happened long before anyone was watching.
Expect plenty of follow-up papers before anyone calls the formation debate settled - a sample size of one has a way of becoming a footnote once planet number two shows up.