A new ‘baby Jupiter’ is offering fresh clues about planet formation

Artist’s impression of a giant planet forming. NASA, ESA, STScI, Joseph Olmsted (STScI)   How do planets form? For many years scientists thought they understood this process by studying the one example we had access to our own Solar System. However, the discovery of planets around distant stars in the 1990s made it clear that the picture was much more complicated than we knew. In new research, we have spotted a hot, Jupiter-like gas giant in the process of forming around a star about 500 light-years from Earth. This rare babysnap of a planet actually in the process of forming,…

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