The discovery has important implications regarding the formation of planets in the circumstellar disks around newborn stars.
The discovery of the first planet around another star than the Sun in 1995 gave this field of astronomical research an enormous observational and theoretical impetus. At the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA) the search for exoplanets and the numerical simulation of the formation of planets is an important area of research. Within a long-term survey, a team at the Institute has now found the youngest planet known so far in the circumstellar disk of the eight to ten million years old star TW Hydrae. The discovery has important implications regarding the formation of planets in the circumstellar disks around newborn stars.