We all know the story of Pluto: the underdog planet stripped of its title as one of the primary nine in our solar system, left lonely and sad as a “dwarf planet.” Though in a less dramatic turn than the apocalyptic Hollywood-esque method, Pluto faced its end scientifically.

With that being said, there are obviously a few ways to bring about the end of a planet. What we as humans, in the entire history of human study of the cosmos, have not been able to see until this October of 2011 is the exact reverse of Pluto’s demotion: a new planet’s formation.
Adam Kraus and Michael Ireland, astronomers operating out of the University of Hawaii, released a statement that “we realized we had uncovered a super Jupiter-sized gas planet, but that we could also measure the dust and gas surrounding it. We’d found a planet at its very beginning.”

While observing a cluster of about 150 young stars in their formation process, the pair picked up on a gaseous formation orbiting a star with the same apparent mass as our own sun. Named “LkCa 15 b,” the “baby”planet is the first ever to be found before its formation is complete.

New technologies and imaging systems, developed in the last five years or so, are mostly credited with this newfound ability to see planetary development. Looking through a group of stars, scientists are now able to group dust around the bodies to which disc-like gathering, literally composed of stardust, it belongs, and thus were able to clear a pathway to LkCa 15.

As Kraus told the public when presenting this discovery to NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland on October 19, “It’s like we have an array of small mirrors. We can manipulate the light and cancel out distortions.” Using for the first time this technique, uninterestingly dubbed “aperture mask interferometry,” Kraus and Ireland were able to manipulate the light reaching the Keck telescope in order to analyze the reality of the circumstellar dust ring.

After catching a glimpse of this new celestial body, Kraus and Ireland determined that this was not just another “dwarf planet” among the stars. LkCa 15, has amassed a size rivaling that of Jupiter, leading scientists to believe that when fully formed, it will be about ten times the size of our largest planet.

Called a protoplanet, young LkCa 15 has the potential to grow even further, with apparently “about 55 Jupiter masses of material left” in its outer disc of materials set to be transformed into the planetary makeup.

LkCa 15 is charted as the youngest planet ever found, at about 2 million years into its lifespan already. Orbiting this sun-like star, astronomers now believe that is part of an entire planetary system. “The age of the star was determined by a great many people studying the gravitational contraction of both LkCa 15 and all of the other stars in the Taurus star forming region, which formed at nearly the same time,” Ireland told presses. “We really have the age of the star and not the planet.”

The planet’s assumed age is five times younger than that of the next youngest protoplanet, reports Discovery News, and points to the possible formation of a new solar system.

Much is still left unknown about this planet, its surroundings, and its future, but the implications are huge. Astronomers now have a precedent for finding planets in construction, and so can reasonably evaluate the planetary status of objects found in the skies.

What else is out there, beyond the abilities of even our most up-to-date astronomical instruments? We don’t even have machines to tell the future as of yet, and so the world will just have to wait and see.