Free Astronomy Magazine January-February 2025

40 ASTRO PUBLISHING form completely, or because our view of these planets is blocked by a residual protoplanetary disc, which is a disc of dense gas and dust that sur- rounds a newly formed star, and from which the planets are formed. Bar- ber, and the others collaborating in the project, analyzed the data from NASA’s Transiting Exo- planet Survey Satellite (TESS) and observed a young star, only 3 million years old, cata- logued as IRAS 04125+2902, which is relatively near to the Earth (522 light years away). This young star, classified as a T Tauri type, is in the Tau- rus-Auriga star forma- tion region, and still retains part of the gas and dust of its protoplan- etary disc a r ound it. In the o b s e r - vations the re- IAC and NASA detect a “baby planet” around a nearby star R esearchers at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) in collaboration with other enti- ties, such as NASA, have managed to detect the youngest planet ever found, using the technique of tran- sits. This “baby planet” is paradoxi- cally a giant in orbit round a very young star. The Principal Investiga- tor of this finding, which has been published in the journal Nature , is Madyson Barber, of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Other authors of the article include Felipe Murgas and Enric Palle of the IAC. The discovery was made using the technique of transits. This works be- cause if the orbit of a planet passes through the line of sight between the Earth and its star, every time the planet passes across the face of the star it cuts out a small proportion of the light and this regular dip in the star’s brightness can be measured. Before this discovery the scientists had found more than a dozen plan- ets around stars with ages between 10 and 40 million years using the method of transits. However, using this method younger planets had not been detected, either because such planets had not had time to by IAC Felipe Murgas Enric Pallé