For the last 20 years the giant planets known as hot Jupiters have presented astronomers with a puzzle. How did they settle into orbits 100 times closer to their host stars than our own Jupiter is to the Sun ? An international team of astronomers has announced the discovery of a newborn hot Jupiter, orbiting an infant sun - only 2 million years old, the stellar equivalent of a week-old human baby. The discovery that hot Jupiters can already be present at such an early stage of star-planet formation represents a major step forward in our understanding of how planetary systems form and evolve. Learn more about this discovery here.

Although first detected 20 years ago, hot Jupiters are still enigmatic bodies. These celestial objects are giant Jupiter-like exoplanets that orbit 20 times closer to their host stars than the Earth does to the Sun. Using the ESPaDOnS spectro-polarimeter on the 3.6m Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope atop Maunakea, a dormant volcano on the big island of Hawaii, an international team of astronomers led by JF Donati secured preliminary evidence that hot Jupiters can be generated in as little as a few million years - a timescale equivalent to one week if the 10-billion-year-lifetime of a planetary system were scaled down to a human life. This discovery, published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS), will help us better understand how planetary systems like (or unlike) the solar system form and evolve into maturity. Learn more about this discovery here.