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A growing baby planet photographed for first time in a ring of darkness

Written by Daniel Stolte and originally posted at UA News. Featured on kvoa.com.

A team of astronomers has detected — for the first time — a growing planet outside our solar system, embedded in a cleared gap of a multi-ringed disk of dust and gas. The team, led by University of Arizona astronomer Laird Close and Richelle van Capelleveen, an astronomy Ph.D. student at Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands, discovered the unique exoplanet using the University of Arizona’s MagAO-X extreme adaptive optics system at the Magellan Telescope in Chile, the U of A’s LBT telescope in Arizona and the Very Large Telescope, or VLT, at the European Southern Observatory in Chile. Their results are published in two papers appearing on Aug. 26 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.


Composite photo of the WISPIT 2 system as seen by the Magellan Telescope in Chile and the Large Binocular Telescope in Arizona. The protoplanet WISPIT 2b appears as a purple dot in a dust-free gap between a bright, white dust ring around the star and a fainter, outer ring, orbiting at about 56 times the average distance between the Earth and the sun. The other potential planet, CC1, appears as the red object inside the dust free cavity and is estimated to be about 15 Earth-sun distances from its host star. Credit: Laird Close, University of Arizona.


For years, astronomers have observed several dozen planet-forming disks of gas and dust surrounding young stars. Many of these disks display gaps in their rings, hinting at the possibility that they are being “plowed” by nearby nascent planets, or protoplanets, like lanes being cleared by a snowplow. Yet, only about three actual young growing protoplanets have been discovered to date, all in the cavities between a host star and the inner edge of its adjacent protoplanetary disk. Until this discovery, no protoplanets had been seen in the conspicuous disk gaps — which appear as dark rings.

“Dozens of theory papers have been written about these observed disk gaps being caused by protoplanets, but no one’s ever found a definitive one until today,” said Close, professor of astronomy at the University of Arizona. He calls the discovery a “big deal,” because the absence of planet discoveries in places where they should be has prompted many in the scientific community to invoke alternative explanations for the ring-and-gap pattern found in many proto-planetary disks.
“It’s been a point of tension, actually, in the literature and in astronomy in general, that we have these really dark gaps, but we cannot detect the faint exoplanets in them,” he said. “Many have doubted that protoplanets can make these gaps, but now we know that in fact, they can. “

4.5 billion years ago, our solar system began as just such a disk. As dust coalesced into clumps, sucking up gas around them, the first protoplanets began to form. How exactly this process unfolded, however, is still largely a mystery. To find answers, astronomers have looked to other planetary systems that are still in their infancy, known as planet-forming disks, or protoplanetary disks.

Close’s team took advantage of an adaptive optics (AO) system, one of the most formidable of its kind in the world, developed and built by Jared Males, Laird Close and their students. Jared Males is an associate astronomer at Steward Observatory and the principal investigator of MagAO-X. MagAO-X, which stands for “Magellan Adaptive Optics System eXtreme,” dramatically improves the sharpness and resolution of telescope images by compensating for atmospheric turbulence, the phenomenon that causes stars to flicker and blur, and is dreaded by astronomers.

Suspecting there should be invisible planets hiding in the gaps of protoplanetary disks, Close’s team surveyed all the disks with gaps and probed them for a specific emission of visible light known as hydrogen alpha or H-alpha.

“As planets form and grow, they suck in hydrogen gas from their surroundings, and as that gas crashes down on them like a giant waterfall coming from outer space and hits the surface, it creates extremely hot plasma, which in turn, emits this particular H-alpha light signature,” Close explained. “MagAO-X is specially designed to look for hydrogen gas falling onto young protoplanets, and that’s how we can detect them.”


In this artist’s illustration, infalling hydrogen gas causes the growing protoplanet WISPIT 2b to shine brightly in the hydrogen alpha spectrum, to which the MagAO-X instrument is particularly sensitive.
Art from Joseph Olmsted/STScI/NASA

The team used the 6.5-meter Magellan Telescope and MagAO-X to probe WISPIT-2, a disk van Capelleveen recently discovered with the VLT. Viewed in H-alpha light, Close’s group struck gold. A dot of light appeared inside the gap between two rings of the protoplanetary disk around the star. In addition, the team observed a second candidate planet inside the “cavity” between the star and the inner edge of the dust and gas disk.

“Once we turned on the adaptive optics system, the planet jumped right out at us,” said Close, who called this one of the more important discoveries in his career. “After combining two hours’ worth of images, it just popped out.”

According to Close, the planet, designated WISPIT 2b, is a very rare example of a protoplanet in the process of accreting material onto itself. Its host star, WISPIT 2 is similar to the sun and about the same mass. The inner planet candidate, dubbed CC1, contains about 9 Jupiter masses, whereas the outer planet, WISPIT 2b, weighs in at about 5 Jupiter masses. These masses were inferred, in part, from the thermal infrared light observed by the University of Arizona’s 8.4-meter Large Binocular Telescope on Mount Graham in Southeastern Arizona with the help of U of A astronomy graduate student Gabriel Weible.

“It’s a bit like what our own Jupiter and Saturn would have looked like when they were 5,000 times younger than they are now,” Weible said. “The planets in the WISPIT-2 system appear to be about 10 times more massive than our own gas giants and more spread out. But the overall appearance is likely not so different from what a nearby ‘alien astronomer’ could have seen in a ‘baby picture’ of our solar system taken 4.5 billion years ago.”


University of Arizona’s MagAO-X instrument in the clean room at the Magellan Telescope in Chile. Photo credit: Jared Males 

“Our MagAO-X adaptive optics system is optimized like no other to work well at the H-alpha wavelength, so you can separate the bright starlight from the faint protoplanet,” Close said. “Around WISPIT 2 you likely have two planets and four rings and four gaps. It’s an amazing system.”

CC1 might orbit at about 14-15 astronomical units (AU) — with one AU equaling the average distance between the sun and Earth, which would place it halfway between Saturn and Uranus, if it was part of our solar system, according to Close. WISPIT-2b, the planet carving out the gap, is farther out at about 56 AU, which in our own solar system, would put it well past the orbit of Neptune, around the outer edge of the Kuiper Belt.

A second paper published in parallel and led by Richelle van Capelleveen and the University of Galway details the detection of the planet in the infrared light spectrum and the discovery of the multi-ringed system with the 8-meter VLT telescope’s SPHERE adaptive optics system.

“To see planets in the fleeting time of their youth, astronomers have to find young disk systems, which are rare,” van Capelleveen said, “because that’s the one time that they really are brighter and so detectable. If the WISPIT-2 system was the age of our solar system and we used the same technology to look at it, we’d see nothing. Everything would be too cold and too dark.”

This research was supported in part by a grant from the NASA eXoplanet Research Program (XRP). MagAO-X was developed in part by a grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation and by the generous support of the Heising-Simons Foundation. 

Laird Close et al. 2025 “Wide Separation Planets In Time (WISPIT): Discovery of a Gap H-alpha Protoplanet WISPIT 2b with MagAO-X”:  https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/adf7a5

Richelle van Capelleveen et al. 2025 “WIde Separation Planets In Time (WISPIT): A gap-clearing planet in a multi-ringed disk around the young solar-type star WISPIT 2”:  https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/adf721

AO Summer School Part III: The Return of the Higher Orders

We have reached the epic conclusion of yet another AO summer school. Stay with me, dear reader, as we have much to cover:

Day 4: The Penultimate Chapter

After 4 days in Santa Cruz, I was itching to see a patented yellow slime ball, affectionately known as the “Banana Slug.” In a sort-of slug summoning ceremony, I slipped on my slug stompers at sunrise.

The slug stompers (or slippers) in question.

The morning session began with a great controls theory talk given by Dr. Nour Skaf. Sadly, Nour did not stay at the workshop for very long, as she left to begin her new faculty position at UH IFA!!! 🙂 *catjam* *catjam intensifies*

All suffering stems from the mind.

We then heard from UCO director and GPI extraordinaire, Bruce Macintosh, about error budgets within AO systems.

Bruce and I harbor a common fear of NCPAs.


After a long morning’s work AO-ing, it was time to take a brief nap:

This photo is sponsored by UVic’s New Earth Laboratory.

Following a quick nap, we worked on an AO simulation workshop led by UC Santa Cruz post doc and HCIPy conspirator, Emiel Por. There are no photos from this activity so I will leave the visuals to the reader’s imagination.

After dinner, Parker went on a hike while others studied for quals or worked on grant applications:

After an unsuccessful attempt to observe some stars, we gathered outside the dorms to sit on tree stumps:

No injuries occurred during the scaling of this tree stump.

We were kind enough to include this green table in our group selfie:

Selfie with a green table

Day 5: No Fish in the Microwave

The fifth and final day of the AO summer school began with an important reminder:

The banana slugs enforce a strict no fish in microwave policy.

The final day also included talks on astrophotonics, AO in space, and AO for microscopy!

As this blog post is biased towards my areas of research interests, I included a photo from Rus Belikov’s talk of EFC being done before it was cool:

Call this OG(FC).

Finally, it was time for the moment that we have all been waiting for–the AO Summer School Vision Awards 2025!

I won the award for Worst Optics (I thought about contesting but I was bribed with banana slug stickers)! And Parker won the adaptive pupil award!

We then went on a social excursion to the Santa Cruz boardwalk/arcade/karaoke facility/casino/bowling alley/laser tag room!

Here’s to a successful AO summer school!

Our wild turkey participants forgot to join us for the group photo.

Just before leaving, we finally got some slug-tent:

Ring, ring, ring, ring, ring, banana slug.

I would like to dedicate this blog post to Keck’s broken dome shutter.

(Broken) Shutter island.

Song of the Day:

AO Summer School Part II: Labs and Laundry

Another couple of days of AO Summer School are in the books! We’ve moved well beyond introductions and into the core of adaptive optics, exploring topics like wavefront sensing and reconstruction, atmospheric turbulence, and deformable mirrors. Alongside the great lectures, we’ve also had the chance to put the concepts we learned into practice through hands-on labs. In one of our labs, we explored different types of wavefront sensors (WFS) including the Shack-Hartmann WFS, and the Pyramid WFS. Below is Katie and Marcus’s groups setup for the wavefront sensor lab.

The rest of the afternoon was spent touring labs, starting with the Santa Cruz Extreme AO Lab (SEAL). From there, we got a sneak peek at SCALES (imaged below), an upcoming Keck instrument built to probe the compositions of exoplanet atmospheres.

The next lab space we visited was UC Santa Cruz’s massive marble test bed, and their shop where they test new techniques to make shells for deformable mirrors.

The final place we stopped by had a bunch of cool history about UC Santa Cruz’s involvement with optics and astronomy. In the photo below, you can see the 3 meter telescope (yellow structure) at Lick Observatory that was commissioned in 1959. Compare this to the more modern 10 meter Keck telescope structure commissioned in 1985.

On a more serious note, a washing machine was located and disaster was avoided with regards to Josh may or may not having anymore clean clothes halfway through the workshop….

While I’m sure the people are dying for some much needed Vizzy content, the campus turkeys and deer with have to suffice for now.

Song of the Day

AO Summer School Part I: Santa Cruisin’

Don’t worry, folks–we’ve heard your begging and pleading for more XWCL #blogtent, and the time has finally come. This blogbuster series will come in (at least) three installments, each from a different POV, as we embark on our one-week AO crash course here at the University of California, Santa Cruz. We’re pulling out all the stops: a brand-new cast of guest stars, some of the old regulars, top-tier science, and (with a little luck) a banana slug or two. Buckle up.

No, seriously, buckle up. It turns out that Highway 17 between San Jose and Santa Cruz is no joke, and we were in for quite the ride to UCSC campus. California traffic may be a little foreign to me, but even I could tell that something was up as our Uber driver bobbed and weaved through gridlock in residential neighborhoods for the first 20 minutes. Turns out there was a wreck blocking all traffic down the highway and into town, so our driver did what any rational driver would do: he put the car in park, set his iPad on the dashboard, and we all watched Happy Gilmore 2. If you haven’t seen the movie, I will say that I believe dashboard iPad (with the addition of both Spanish subtitles and English Audio Description) was the way the director intended for it to be seen. No photos were taken of this experience, so you’ll just have to trust me–it was ethereal.

Day 1 of summer school was all about introductions: introducing ourselves to the other participants, introducing the instructors, and introducing the foundations of adaptive optics. We’ve quickly made friends with AO aficionados from all over: Canada, Hawaii, Australia, Finland, and South Korea, to name a few. Josh and Parker really hit it off with some new non-human friends as well.

Parker and I got to give 1-minute pitches for our posters, which will hang up all week as fuel for discussions during coffee breaks:

yay for matching MagAO-X templates!

The agenda was packed: In the morning, Dr. Rebecca Jensen-Clem gave an overview introduction to Adaptive Optics for astronomy, and we played a card game themed around closing the loop on an AO system at Gemini North.

In the afternoon session, we had a crash course on geometric and physical optics by Dr. Renate Kupke as well as an intro to AO for vision science by Dr. Nicole Putnam. We learned a ton about the human eye, and about how to look cool in silly glasses:

The day rounded out with a reception at the Center for Adaptive Optics, where two very exciting things happened:

1. We got to use a really nifty wavefront sensor system to measure the aberrations in our own eyes. We’ll get to use the aberration maps and Zernike coefficients calculated by the system in vision science workshops later in the week. This is the kind of geeky biodata I absolutely love. Who else out there gets to measure their eye’s PSF?

2. There was a cheese platter. There was a large cheese platter. There was a large cheese platter that remained mostly untouched throughout the evening. I’m pretty sure you can guess who volunteered to bring the extras back to his dorm. A dream come true.

Since this is the first blog post of this trip, I get to make the rules. I’ll keep it simple and on theme: since we’re enjoying the lovely geography so much, the song of the day must be related to California in some way.

Old Hollywood – Julian Casablancas

Sagan Summer Workshop 2025: Silver Jubilee, yipee!

Imagine, if you would, the beautiful Caltech Campus. Imagine, if you would be so generous, a population of exoplanets. Imagine, if you would be so kind, the beautiful minds of exoplanet scientists convening for the 25th year in a row.

That should put you in the mood for this very hypothetical blog post. Both in that the SSW of 2025 was about exoplanet populations, which inherently include speculation and projection, and also in that I forgot to take any sensible photos, so you’re going to have to paint some mental images for yourself.

The beautiful Caltech campus. Theoretically filled with exoplanet enthusiasts for the workshop.
(Photo courtesy of Gabe Weible)

The crux of most SSWs are to help younger generations of researchers connect with a topic in exoplanets through lectures and hands on activities. Discussions are more fundamental than you would get from a typical conference and talks are staged to build on each other throughout the week.

This year was a celebration of hitting 25 sagan workshops, and so was an overview of how each detection method has aided our understanding of the whole of exoplanet populations. Take a wild guess at the favorite plot….

THE observation demographics plot. Plot taken from Christoph Mordasini’s “Demographics Synthesis” Talk

The best part of the Sagan Workshop series is that they’re truly meant to be a resource. There are no registration fees and all the talks are posted online after. So I’ll present my chef’s choice from this year with links if you’d like to relive it yourself.

Slide from Josh Winn’s talk on Transiting exoplanet surveys.

If you’d like to know more about the biases in transiting exoplanet surveys, I highly recommend Josh Winn’s talk Twenty-Five Years of Transiting Planets (Video). He steps through a map of our transit detections through the years and different missions, which really helps contextualize how mission planning shapes the science we use for demographics. The selected slide above is, admittedly, a spoiler for to his very well-crafted narrative.

How many of these have we pointed MagAO-X at?

Of course, I’m contractually obligated to serve up the Direct Imaging talk on this menu. Not only because it really helped put my own work in context, or that all our favorite systems got a shout out, but the speaker Eric Neilson is a former Laird grad student. Check out Eric’s run down of the state of the feild here: Detection Techniques: Direct Imaging (Video)

Tim discussing what affects the certainties in astrometry measurements.
(Slide from Tim Brandt’s talk)

Tim Brandt’s talk on absolute astrometry finally got me to understand exactly what the hub-bub around Gaia is about. Tim turned my vague notions on astrometry to appreciation for the nuances and limitation of the genre. Highly recommend this talk for a brush up: Detecting and Weighing Exoplanets with Absolute Astrometry (Video)

The quilted together occurrence rate conclusion for this demographics talk.

Finally, I really enjoyed Brendan Bowler’s talk on Gas Giant Demographics (Video). We talk a lot about the distinct populations each technique can study, but this was a really interesting way of tying what each technique gives us for a given population. Gas giants at different separations and ages are approached in different ways, but are quilted together in a great summary here. The talk is also just very expertly crafted, an instant resource.

In addition to the educational talk series, there were also posters and short advertisements for poster pops. I gave my poster on the direct imaging work MagAO-X has been doing on Beta Pic b. Imagine I gave a poster pop and had actually taken a photo, it might look something like:

Apologies to my friend Shishir, who was originally the subject of this image.

I also had great conversations over the poster session, across a variety of active research projects. With some stretch of the imagination, that poster session could have looked something like:

A satisfying update on our Beta Pic b Project, pushing bluer than any other project has gotten on the darling hot Jupiter.

It’s true that this year was not necessarily the most on topic for us, but the workshop was a good reminder how far the field of exoplanets has come in my lifetime, and how bright the future is with Gaia DR3, PLATO, HWO, and more.

Song of the week:

“Sagan’s Song” by Emily Davis