A Cosmic Laboratory for Planet Formation in the WISPIT-2 System
These images, taken with ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT) shows a planetary system being born around the young star WISPIT 2. The star is surrounded by a disc of gas and dust -- the raw material out of which planets form and grow. In 2025 a team of astronomers detected a young planet, called WISPIT 2b, carving out a gap in the disc around the star. Now the same team has confirmed the presence of a second planet, WISPIT 2c, orbiting even closer to the star, as shown in the inset.
© ESO/C. Lawlor, R. F. van Capelleveen et al.
To the point
- Two protoplanets have been detected in the young star system WISPIT 2 - one of the rare cases in which multiple forming planets have been directly observed.
- Using the upgraded GRAVITY+ instrument on the ESO VLTI, a previously hidden planet close to the bright parent star has been detected.
- The system offers new insights into the parallel evolution of planets in their early stages of development.
The GRAVITY experiment, developed at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE), has observed two newly forming exoplanets still in the process of formation around the young star WISPIT 2. This discovery offers a rare glimpse into the early stages of planet formation - into the "birth" of new worlds, so to speak. These new GRAVITY+ observations provide the first clear evidence of a second young protoplanet in the recently discovered WISPIT-2 system.
A young star and two forming planets
Two planets forming around the young star WISPIT 2: The newly detected protoplanet WISPIT 2c orbits very close to its host star (right panel). Confirmed using the GRAVITY+ instrument, it was also spectroscopically analysed in the infrared (lower panel). The spectrum reveals a clear detection of carbon monoxide, a characteristic atmospheric signature of young gas giant planets.
© ESO/C. Lawlor, R. F. van Capelleveen et al.
The star WISPIT 2 is around five million years old, making it a young version of our Sun. The star is surrounded by a disc of gas and dust in which new planets are forming. Back in August 2025, researchers from the University of Galway, Leiden Observatory, and the University of Arizona discovered a massive gas-giant protoplanet, WISPIT 2b, there, with about five times the mass of Jupiter. The planet WISPIT 2b is 57 astronomical units from its star, which is ten times the distance between the Sun and Jupiter.
This led to a series of follow-up observations led by the University of Galway, which have now culminated in this new study with the discovery of a second protoplanet - WISPIT 2c. It is about twice as massive as WISPIT 2b and orbits its parent star at a distance of about 14 astronomical units, four times closer than WISPIT 2b. Although WISPIT 2c is more massive and therefore fundamentally brighter, its greater proximity to the star presents a unique challenge: detecting its faint signal in the immediate vicinity of a bright star.
A technological breakthrough makes the impossible possible
The discovery of the new baby planets was made possible by the GRAVITY+ project, an international collaboration led by the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics. By upgrading both the European Southern Observatory's (ESO) Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI) and the GRAVITY instrument, GRAVITY+ delivers unprecedented sensitivity and resolution. This enabled the researchers to make the planet's extremely faint light visible, despite the star in its immediate vicinity being a thousand times brighter.
"WISPIT 2 will become a unique laboratory for studying planetary formation," explains Guillaume Bourdarot, a scientist at the MPE and member of the GRAVITY+ consortium. "By combining interferometric precision with new adaptive optics, we were able to measure a signal that had previously been completely hidden in the starlight. This is a clear example of how the development of cutting-edge astronomical instruments leads to fundamental discoveries."
A rare twin birth in the cosmos
Such direct observations of planets in their formation phase are extremely rare. Among thousands of known exoplanets, there has so far been only a single star around which multiple protoplanets have been detected: the PDS-70 system. WISPIT 2 is thus one of the few systems in which two protoplanets have been confirmed simultaneously. "Finding two planets at such an early stage at the same time is almost like witnessing a rare twin birth," says Frank Eisenhauer, Director of the Infrared Group at MPE and project leader of GRAVITY+. "This shows that planetary systems do not develop one after the other, but in parallel - much like our own Solar System once did."
A Gateway to the Future: JWST and the ESO's Extremely Large Telescope
In the coming years, WISPIT 2 is to be studied further using ESO's Very Large Telescope and GRAVITY+, as well as, in the future, the MICADO instrument currently being developed at the MPE for the Extremely Large Telescope. Scientists hope this will give them an even better understanding of how gas, dust and gravity coalesce to form new planets - and thus how worlds are born.
