A team of astronomers in Hawaii has discovered an infant planet near a distant star, and the ability to take photos of it could provide insights about how planets are formed.

A report by the astronomers, accepted by the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society scientific journal on Oct. 14, details the discovery of the exoplanet, which is estimated to be 2 million to 5 million years old.

The gas planet and its parent star are in the Taurus Cloud, a stellar “nursery” with other young stars more than 400 light-years, or 2.5 quadrillion miles, away.

Exoplanet 2M0437b — an unwieldy but still practical name considering its parent star is called 2M0437 — was first observed in 2018 through the Subaru Telescope on Mauna Kea.

Teruyuki Hirano, a visiting University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy researcher from Japan, was the first to see the planet. The team had been studying 2M0437b’s parent star when they discovered the planet itself.

“(The star) dimmed slightly on a regular basis, and this dimming, we think, is caused by dust in its orbit,” said Eric Gaidos, an IfA associate astronomer and the lead author of the report. “We were just investigating this star, and Teruyuki … basically sent me this image and said, ‘Hey, look. There’s this very faint object very close to the star. What is that?’ And it went from there.”

The image of the exoplanet is a rare sight for human eyes — scientists have been able to take direct photos of only a few dozen others. Thousands of exoplanets have been discovered, but they are normally detected indirectly after researchers study the variations in velocity and brightness of their parent stars.

2M0437b was visible only via telescope because it is sufficiently far from its star and is so young that it’s still radiating heat and light generated during its formation. The planet’s temperature is estimated to be about 1,400-1,500 Kelvins, or roughly the same temperature as lava.

“If this planet existed but we discovered it not at 2 million years (old), but at 2 billion, we would never see it with our telescopes, because it would have cooled off so much that it would basically be emitting no light that we could detect,” said Michael Liu, an IfA researcher and another of the report’s authors.

The ability to observe exoplanets directly provides researchers with a wealth of information that they wouldn’t be able to get by studying planets indirectly, including color, temperature and chemical composition.

While a few times larger than Jupiter, 2M0437b is smaller than most other directly observed exoplanets on record and is younger than all but a handful of them.

Its youth is a characteristic that can help fill in gaps in understanding about the formation of planets.

Liu said those interested in how planets are made would benefit from being able to observe planets “over a whole range of different ages and a whole range of different masses, because we’re trying to basically put together the movie of how planets form and evolve. … And this one’s the beginning of the movie, so to speak.”

Scientists currently use other clues to get ideas of how individual planets are formed, but the process largely still needs to be figured out.

“The process is very complex. We don’t understand most of it,” Gaidos said. “In our own solar system we have vestiges, we have records, ancient records — meteorites, planets themselves — of those early steps that led to the formation of planets. … The more we learn in each of these avenues, the more we create a framework in which we describe how this goes on. This is one of the great challenges of astronomy for the next decade.”

2M0437b and its parent star are invisible to the naked eye, but a UH news release said that the Taurus Cloud is “almost directly overhead in the pre-dawn hours, north of the bright star Hoku‘ula (Aldeberan) and east of the Makali‘i (Pleiades) star cluster.”