Sagnick Mukherjee

A kindergarten where some kids are busy making sandcastles while others are already assembling building blocks. That's roughly what the V1298 Tau system looks like: it's only 20 million years old — by cosmic standards, it just left the nursery. Several planets orbit it, and two of them, b and e, turned out to be surprisingly different.

Astronomers using the JWST (James Webb Space Telescope) have for the first time studied in detail the atmosphere of a young exoplanet, V1298 Tau c. This super-Earth, a planet more massive than Earth but less so than gas giants, is only 23 million years old.