Protoplanet Around AB Aurigae (Artist’s Concept)

This is an artist's illustration of a massive, newly forming exoplanet called AB Aurigae b. Researchers used new and archival data from the Hubble Space Telescope and the Subaru Telescope to confirm this protoplanet is forming through an intense and violent process, called disk instability. Disk instability is a top-down approach, much different from the dominant core accretion model. In this scenario, a massive disk around a star cools, and gravity causes the disk to rapidly break up into one or more planet-mass fragments.

AB Aurigae b is estimated to be about nine times more massive than Jupiter and orbits its host star over two times farther than Pluto is from our Sun.