‘Wispit 2C’ is estimated to be 5m years old and about 10 times the mass of Jupiter.
Chloe Lawlor from Galway has discovered a new planet – the second to be found forming near a newborn star called ‘Wispit 2’, 437 light years away.
As a child, Lawlor wanted to be a musician, he tells SiliconRepublic.com. However, he changed his mind when he joined the university. “I switched to physics because I liked physics in school, so I thought, ‘Oh, maybe I’ll just try this.’
The 25-year-old says discoveries like this appeal to people’s innate curiosity to know how we came to be, how we came to be and why we are here. Lawlor is a PhD student at the University of Galway’s Center for Astronomy in the School of Natural Sciences and the Ryan Institute.
He is working in collaboration with project leader Richelle van Capelleveen, a PhD student at the Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands, and postdoctoral researcher Guillaume Bourdarot, of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany, to learn more about dwarf planets and how they form.
“Most of the planets we’ve seen are very old,” Lawlor said. “We don’t know how they get to those final stages like things like our Solar System.
“This is very important to these theories of formation and hopefully will tell us a lot about these young systems, how they form, and how they evolve.”
Lawlor’s new discovery, an exoplanet called ‘Wispit 2C’, is thought to be about 5m years old. ‘Wispit 2B’, the nearest planet was discovered last year by van Capelleveen and Dr Laird Close of the University of Arizona.
Both of these exoplanets are in the early stages of formation in the disk around Wispit, located in the constellation of the Eagle, a prominent equatorial constellation visible in summer in the northern hemisphere near the Milky Way.
Lawlor’s discovery makes Wispit 2 the second known young and forming multiplanet system. The only other system yet discovered with more than one developing planet is PDS 70, 400 light years away.
Wispit 2C is a gas giant, about ten times the mass of Jupiter. It is twice as massive as Wispit 2B and orbits four times closer to its host star, making it incredibly difficult to see with ground-based telescopes.
Wispit 2B and Wispit 2C formed around Wispit 2. Photo: ESO/C. Lawlor, RF van Capelleveen et al.
The exoplanet was discovered using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile’s Atacama Desert. By connecting several telescopes to act as one large instrument, the research team was able to observe the regions closest to the star. In their analysis, the team was able to detect carbon monoxide gas, a chemical commonly found in the atmospheres of small giant planets.
“At first, we weren’t sure if it was a planet or a very large dust. We quickly did a follow-up experiment using the Very Large Telescope Interferometer, an amazing setup where many telescopes can be connected to create a large optical telescope.
“This allowed us to take what we call a spectrum, which is a chemical fingerprint, which reveals the elements and molecules in the atmosphere of the object,” added Lawlor. He led the research published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Professor Frances Fahy, director of the Ryan Institute, said: “The discovery of the planet Wispit 2C is a fantastic achievement and highlights the world-class astronomical research carried out at the University of Galway.” The team will continue its efforts to find more planets in the system.
Last year, research from the University of St Andrews in Scotland showed how floating giant planets can form their own dwarf planets without needing a star to orbit them. In a separate study of 2025, scientists – for the first time – observed the early stages of the formation of a new solar system around a baby star.
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