Rare Newborn Planet May Be the Youngest Ever Detected

A distant, Neptune-size planet 500 light-years from Earth appears to be the youngest fully formed exoplanet ever found crossing its star, raising questions about how it formed so close, so quickly. Researchers first found the planet, which whisks around its star every five days, using the Kepler space telescope currently orbiting Earth. "Our Earth is roughly 4.5 billion years old," Trevor David, a graduate student researcher at the California Institute of Technology and lead author of the n