TUCSON, Ariz. (KGUN) — What started as a mysterious red dot in images taken by University of Arizona astronomers has been confirmed as a huge, newly forming planet — and University of Arizona’s instruments and people played a key role in making it happen.
The new planet, named WISPIT 2c, is in a solar system called WISPIT 2, a young, developing protoplanetary system — effectively a "baby" solar system in the making — where at least two giant planets are actively forming. Located roughly 437 light-years away, this system features a young star surrounded by an extensive disk of dust and gas, with the newborn planets carving out gaps in the disk.
"By bringing together most of the largest optical and infrared telescopes on Earth, this exciting new solar system – with three rings and two massive planets – is now coming into better focus," U of A astronomer Dr. Laird Close said. "WISPIT 2 will be a benchmark exoplanetary system for years to come."
WISPIT 2 was first unveiled in August 2025 when Close and his team used the university’s powerful MagAO‑X (Magellan Adaptive Optics Extreme) camera to take pictures of the system. MagAO‑X (built by Close, Dr. Jared Males and their students) helps remove the blurring caused by Earth’s atmosphere so telescopes can see faint objects near bright stars.
In those images, the team clearly saw one young planet (now known at WISPIT 2b) tucked in a dark gap in the star’s dusty disk...and they also noticed a second, redder spot they named “CC1.”
At first, CC1 could have been either a clump of dust or a real planet. Follow‑up observations from the Large Binocular Telescope, where Steward Observatory graduate student Gabriel Weible helped with the work, made the object easier to study but did not fully settle the question.
Now an international team led by Chloe Lawlor at the University of Galway, working with Close and others, has confirmed CC1 is indeed a planet — officially called WISPIT 2c. It’s only about five million years old (very young for a planet) and roughly 10 times the mass of Jupiter, making it one of the biggest young planets ever directly studied. Even though it’s physically larger than its sibling WISPIT 2b, it orbits much closer to the star, in a part of the disk that’s hard to observe from Earth.
The final confirmation came from a powerful array of telescopes in Chile that work together to make extremely sharp measurements. Scientists detected carbon monoxide gas in the planet’s atmosphere — a clear sign of a young, gas‑giant planet still forming. That chemical clue helped convince the team they were looking at a real planet, not just a blob of dust.
"Carbon monoxide is one of the key signatures we look for in young giant planets. When we saw it clearly in the data, that was when we knew we had something significant," said Lawlor. "WISPIT 2 will become an important laboratory to study planet formation."
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