Imagine a planet 7 times the mass of Jupiter, hot enough to glow slightly, and containing dusty clouds of carbon monoxide and water. That planet is HR 8799c, one of the few worlds outside our Solar System which astronomers have been able to image directly. Part of the reason for its weirdness is its youth: the planet is only about 30 million years old, compared to the Solar System’s 4.5 billion-year age. In fact, up until an observation published this week, astronomers couldn’t be sure HR 8799c was even a planet: many of its properties make it look more like a brown dwarf, the star-like objects not quite massive enough to shine via nuclear fusion. Despite its strange aspects, the planet could help astronomers understand how the HR 8799 system formed—and reveal information about the origins of our own Solar System.

Quinn Konopacky, Travis Barman, Bruce Macintosh, and Christian Marois performed a detailed spectral analysis of the atmosphere of the possible exoplanet. They compared their findings to the known properties of a brown dwarf and concluded that they don’t match—it is indeed a young planet. Chemical differences between HR 8799c and its host star led the researchers to conclude the system likely formed in the same way the Solar System did. [Read more…]