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

GMagAO-X featured in Steward GMT overview

We haven’t said much about GMagAO-X since the PDR went well, but we’re still a key part of the collaboration’s suite of instruments. This week we’re in the Steward news talking about what the future instrument could mean for science:

At first light, astronomers will use a special tool called GMag AO-X, an “extreme AO” coronagraph. It will block out starlight and reveal the faint glimmers of orbiting planets.

“The Giant Magellan Telescope will be a major upgrade for our ability to study planets around other stars, especially when we take pictures of them using the in-development instrument GMag AO-X,” said Jared Males from the University of Arizona. 

“The big improvement in resolution and sensitivity over today’s telescopes will open the most exciting science case imaginable: looking for life on those planets by focusing on their atmospheres,” he enthused.’

Read more at the original article: “The Giant Magellan Telescope ushers in a new era of astronomy” by Eric Ralls

Sebastiaan Haffert wins prestigious New Horizons Prize

Our ex-postdoc in international news? Our very own Sebastiaan Haffert has had the honor of winning the 2025 New Horizons in Physics Prize in astronomy with Rebecca Jensen-Clem and Maaike Van-Kooten!

This year’s New Horizons in Physics Prizes honor early-career researchers across a wide range of fields. […] In astronomy, Sebastiaan Haffert, Rebecca Jensen-Clem and Maaike van Kooten have designed and enabled novel techniques for extreme adaptive optics, which are systems that compensate for the effects of Earth’s atmosphere on light reaching terrestrial telescopes. Their work promises to enable the direct detection of the smallest exoplanets.

The Breakthrough Prize recognizes scientists responsible for cutting edge work across the sciences. Some call it the “Oscars of Science.” The New Horizons Prize is awarded to to early-career researchers.

Congratulations Sebastiaan! You’ve even gotten yourself on the Steward Observatory home page.

Three years of MagAO-X reveals sharper images of PDS 70 companions

Artist’s impression of PDS 70 and its two young planets, surrounded by their own dusty halos.

MagAO-X has shown over the last three years how powerful multi-epoch data can be on one of the most prominent protoplanet system PDS 70. Steward observatory recently highlighted Professor Close’s paper in an article by Penny Duran, quoted below:

MagAO-X’s sharp images revealed the first observation of young planets dramatically changing in brightness. The researchers saw one of the planets (PDS 70 b) fade to one-fifth its original brightness over just three years while the other (PDS 70 c) doubled in brightness, Close said, explaining that the rapid change in brightness at H-alpha could be due to changes in the amount of hydrogen gas that is flowing onto the planets.

Planet variability wasn’t the only thing disentangled from the dataset:

“We can see, for the first time, rings of dust surrounding protoplanets made visible by the bright starlight reflecting off of them,” added Jialin Li, a doctoral student in astronomy and co-author of the paper.

Figure 6. from paper showing Strehl ratio improvement and intensity fluctuation over the three years of H-Alpha imaging.

Read the Paper in the Astronomical Journal: “Three Years of High-contrast Imaging of the PDS 70 b and c Exoplanets at Hα with MagAO-X: Evidence of Strong Protoplanet Hα Variability and Circumplanetary Dust” by Laird Close et al.

Read the full article: “Sharper image: U of A-built instrument reveals pictures of ‘baby planets‘” by Penny Duran

GMT: The 7th segment is in the oven!

This past weekend, the MagAO-X team got to take part in a historic event, the casting of the 7th and final GMT segment! The Giant Magellan Telescope is made up of 7th petal-like segments, and the Mirror Lab—a facility on the University of Arizona campus—is the only place in the world that can make them. These 8.4-meter segments have been in production for decades now, and this weekend the final one has started the 6 month journey of melting glass in the 5-rpm rotating furnace, until it cools to a room-temperature parabola. On Saturday the furnace reached its peak temperature, and from there it begins to cool. Interested parties, donors, and investors gathered to celebrate this milestone for the GMT.

On Friday and Saturday, some of the MagAO-X team helped the mirror lab staff give tours. Jialin and I have been training as tour guides for the last few months, Jared’s been doing it since his grad days, and Maggie was there as a GMagAO-X expert. First stop on the tour is the main attraction, the Furnace Room!

The GMT Segment melting in the spinning furnace.

The furnace is actually two levels, with the lower level focused on controls and system monitoring. You can see the large holder where the mirror segment will be hosed out.

Second view of the spinning furnace.
Ohara glass, what goes into the furnace.


The furnace room was hot! You could feel the difference in the oven heating just between Friday and its peak on Saturday. The next room over, where mirrors are ground and polished, is noticeably cooler than the first room. It’s kept at a constant temperature so that there’s no expansion of the glass as it’s brought to nanometers of the specified shape.

Polishing a 6.5m mirror.

Past the polishing room is the integration room, where GMT mirrors are stored in between their different stages of production. One of them, covered in blue, is actually on it’s way to being stored off site! Others are upside down, as they need their actuated backs attached, and so on. This set up is affectionately called the “CD Switcher”.

CD switcher with 3 different GMT segments.
A mirror almost ready to ship!

The three of us were stationed at the end of the tour in the integration room. This isn’t usually a stop on public tours, but it was opened up for the festivities. We got the honor of explaining how excited we are to do the science that the Giant Magellan telescope is built to do!

Prepping the talks and setting up the posters.

In the marching order, I was first! I introduced what MagAO-X is (an extreme AO instrument directly imaging exoplanets on the Magellan Clay telescope) and explained some of the basics of AO.

Me showing MagAO-X in action.

Next was Jialin, talking about the exciting science we get to do with MagAO-X, and the motivation for wanting to make our pretty pictures even prettier.

Jialin explaining what exactly is so cool about H-alpha acreating proto-planets.

Maggie then got to talk about the plans for GMagAO-X! Her work on HCAT, where we’ve done phasing development in lab, is a huge step forward in the feasibility of the project. She got to show the visitors what a GMT pupil would look like.

Maggie explaining the phasing problem in the next generation of ELTs

Finally, Jared got to talk about his favorite planet. Not caught in action, but by the end of his talk, everyone in the audience was thoroughly convinced of the impact that GMagAO-X will make on the exoplanets we love.

Jared prepping his slides, finding the best fake image of Prox-Cen B.

Hanging out with giant mirrors and speaking on the projects we work on was a huge honor! We hope to get to be back when they pull the mirror out of the furnace in March, and for plenty of tours in between.

The team after all the mirror lab tour madness.

Bonus Video:

The team talking about the GMT in an interview recently! This was shown to some of the guests this weekend, and will be around Steward for a while, I’m sure.