New Planet Discovered by 25-Year-Old PhD Student

0:00It's March 24th. Europe news today starts now. AI powered and always on. A team of astronomers led by a 25-year-old PhD student from the University of Galway has discovered a new planet called Wispit-2C, orbiting a young star 430 light years from Earth. This gas giant is about 10 times the mass of Jupiter, and marks the second world found around the star, Wispit-2. The planet was spotted using the very large telescope in Chile's Atacama Desert, one of the world's most advanced observatories. It's twice as massive as the first planet detected their last year, Wispit-2B, and orbits 4 times closer to its star, making it tough to find, from the ground. Chloe Lawler, now in her second year of PhD studies, headed this international effort with researchers from the Netherlands and Germany. She contributed to the earlier discovery under a lecturer, but took the lead this time, building on that success. These findings reveal a very young system, just 5 million years old,

1:02still surrounded by a proto-planetary disk that offers clues to how planets form. The star could mirror what our solar system looked like billions of years ago, filling key gaps in our understanding. The research appears in astrophysical journal letters, and Lawler hopes to continue in the field, perhaps landing a lecturing role after finishing her. PhD in two years. Discoveries like this keep pushing the boundaries of what we know about distant worlds.