Spitzer Finds Youngest Planet
NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope has peered through the dusty haze into the construction zones for new planets and found organic molecules. A team from the University of Rochester surveyed five very young stars in the constellation of Taurus and found these icy organic molecules around all of them. They also found a gap in the planetary disc around a million-year old star, which indicates that a young planet is already forming. This is much earlier than predicted by previous models of planet formation.