Two Planets Forming Now: Are We Watching Our Past?

Have you ever wondered what our solar system looked like 4.5 billion years ago — before Earth existed, before Jupiter finished forming, before any of it made sense?

Welcome, dear reader. We're so glad you found your way here to FreeAstroScience.com. Whether you're a lifelong space enthusiast, a student trying to make sense of the cosmos, or simply someone who looked up at the sky last night and felt that familiar pull of curiosity — this article is for you. Here at FreeAstroScience, we believe science belongs to everyone, and we work hard to explain even the most complex discoveries in plain, honest language. We never want you to switch off your mind. Because as Francisco Goya once warned us, the sleep of reason breeds monsters.

On March 23, 2026, a team led by Chloe Lawlor — a 25-year-old PhD student at the University of Galway, Ireland — published a discovery in The Astrophysical Journal Letters that genuinely stopped us in our tracks. They confirmed a second planet actively forming around a young star called WISPIT 2, located 437 light-years away in the constellation Aquila. This makes WISPIT 2 only the second stellar system in all of astronomy where we've directly seen two planets being born at the same time.

We promise: if you stay with us to the end, you'll come away with a completely new appreciation for your own cosmic address. Let's go.

📌 What's Inside This Article

1. What Is WISPIT 2 — and Why Should You Care?
2. Meet the Two Baby Planets
3. How Scientists Actually Proved It
4. WISPIT 2 and PDS 70: Twins in Formation?
5. Could There Be a Third Planet?
6. What This Means for Our Own Origins

Born From Dust: How We're Finally Watching Planets Come to Life

What Is WISPIT 2 — and Why Should You Care?

Here's the honest truth: most stars we study are ancient. They're already done cooking. Their planets formed billions of years ago, and all we can do is look at the finished product and try to reverse-engineer the recipe. WISPIT 2 is different. It's only about 5.1 million years old — a cosmic infant. For context, our Sun is roughly 4.6 billion years old. WISPIT 2 is less than one tenth of one percent of our Sun's age.

A Cosmic Nursery 437 Light-Years Away

WISPIT 2 sits in the constellation Aquila (the Eagle), about 437 light-years from Earth. It's classified as a young solar analogue — meaning it's structurally similar to our early Sun. Around it swirls a massive protoplanetary disk: a spinning pancake of gas and dust that stretches for hundreds of astronomical units (au). One au is the average distance from Earth to the Sun, roughly 150 million kilometres.

What makes this disk extraordinary isn't just its size. It has multiple rings separated by clear gaps. Those gaps don't just look pretty in telescope images — they're the fingerprints of planets carving paths through the raw material of the disk. Every gap tells a story. And in 2025 and 2026, astronomers finally read two of those stories out loud.

💡 Quick fact: The WISPIT 2 protoplanetary disk is one of only a handful of systems where we've directly observed planets still embedded within their birth disk — not just hinted at, but genuinely confirmed through direct imaging and spectroscopy.

Meet the Two Baby Planets

There are two worlds being built right now in the WISPIT 2 system. Neither looks anything like Earth. They're gas giants — enormous, churning spheres of gas and dust, more akin to Jupiter or Saturn. And yet, watching them form feels deeply personal. Because planets like these were the architects of our own solar system.

WISPIT 2b — The Outer Giant

The first planet, WISPIT 2b, was confirmed in 2025, led by Richelle van Capelleveen, a PhD candidate at Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands. It sits in a gap between the two brightest dust rings, at a distance of roughly 57 au from the star — about 60 times the Earth-Sun distance. Its mass? Approximately 4.9 times that of Jupiter. It's a true giant, and it's been actively scooping up the surrounding disk material since before recorded human history began.

Unlike some candidates that remain ambiguous, WISPIT 2b showed clear signs of active accretion: it was detected emitting hydrogen-alpha (Hα) light — a spectral signature of infalling gas. Translation: we watched it eat. That's how alive this thing is.

WISPIT 2c — The Close-In Surprise

The second planet, WISPIT 2c, is the star of the March 2026 announcement. It sits much closer to WISPIT 2 — only about 14 au from the host star, four times closer than its sibling. And it's bigger: the team estimates a mass of 8 to 12 Jupiter masses, roughly twice that of WISPIT 2b.

What's fascinating — and a little puzzling — is that WISPIT 2c shows no detectable Hα emission. For an object twice as massive, you'd expect to see more active accretion, not less. The team thinks two explanations are on the table: the accretion may simply be variable (it ebbs and flows, like weather), or the planet may be shrouded in a dusty envelope that blocks the optical-wavelength light from escaping. Either way, it's a reminder that planet formation doesn't follow a neat script.

Planetary Architectures at a Glance

Here's a side-by-side look at WISPIT 2's two planets and their counterparts in PDS 70 — the only other system where we've directly imaged two forming planets:

Sources: Lawlor et al. 2026, van Capelleveen et al. 2025, Keppler et al. 2018, Haffert et al. 2019. M₇ = Jupiter masses. au = astronomical units.

Planet	Host Star	Mass (M₇)	Orbital Distance	Hα Emission	Discovery Year
WISPIT 2b	WISPIT 2	~4.9	~57 au	✓ Detected	2025
WISPIT 2c	WISPIT 2	8–12	~14 au	✗ Not detected	2026
PDS 70b	PDS 70	<4.9	~21 au	✓ Detected	2018
PDS 70c	PDS 70	<13.6	~35 au	✓ Detected	2019

How Scientists Actually Proved It

You might be thinking: how do you photograph something 437 light-years away that's still forming inside a cloud of dust and gas? It's a fair question. Directly imaging a protoplanet is one of the hardest things in all of observational astronomy. The disk is bright and messy. The planet is faint and close to its star. It's like trying to spot a firefly next to a lighthouse.

The Power of SPHERE and GRAVITY+

The team used two complementary instruments on ESO's facilities in Chile. First, the SPHERE (Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast Exoplanet REsearch) instrument on the Very Large Telescope (VLT) captured H-band images of the companion. SPHERE uses extreme adaptive optics — essentially, a system of deformable mirrors that corrects for atmospheric blurring in real time — to achieve the resolution needed to resolve such a close-in source.

But imaging alone wasn't enough. To truly confirm the planetary nature of the object, the team turned to the GRAVITY+ instrument on the VLT Interferometer (VLTI). This upgraded system combines the light from four 8.2-metre Unit Telescopes simultaneously, effectively acting as a telescope over 100 metres across. The planet was detected with a signal-to-noise ratio greater than 10 in each of 12 individual exposures. That's not a marginal detection — that's a clear, confident confirmation.

"Critically, our study made use of the recent upgrade to GRAVITY+, without which we would not have been able to get such a clear detection of the planet so close to its star," said co-author Guillaume Bourdarot of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics.

The GRAVITY instrument detects the coherent emission of point-like sources — light that comes from a compact object like a planet, rather than the diffuse glow of the surrounding disk. The mathematical model at the heart of this detection looks like this:

▸ GRAVITY Planet Signal Model (Equation 1 in Lawlor et al. 2026):

V_planet(b, t, λ) = C(λ) × V_star(b, t, λ) × exp(iΦ(b, t, λ))

where b = interferometric baseline, t = time, λ = wavelength, C(λ) = contrast spectrum of the planet relative to the star, V_star = coherent flux of the host star, and Φ(b,t,λ) = phase of the planet signal, defined as:

Φ(b, t, λ) = −(2π / λ) × (ΔRA · u + ΔDEC · v)

with (u, v) = coordinates in the frequency domain, and (ΔRA, ΔDEC) = sky-position of the planet relative to the star.
This interferometric approach is key: it separates the coherent, point-like emission of the planet from the extended, diffuse light of the surrounding disk.

The K-band spectrum from GRAVITY also revealed CO band-head absorption at 2.2935 μm — a well-known chemical signature of young, low-gravity substellar objects like gas giant planets. This spectral fingerprint doesn't appear in stellar atmospheres above ~5300 K, so its presence in the WISPIT 2c data is strong evidence that we're looking at a planetary body, not a background star or a stellar binary companion.

WISPIT 2 and PDS 70: Twins in Formation?

Before March 2026, there was exactly one planetary system in the universe where astronomers had directly observed two planets still forming: PDS 70, a T Tauri star about 370 light-years away. PDS 70 has been the gold standard for planetary formation research since 2018. Now, with WISPIT 2, we have a second example. That may not sound like much — but in science, going from one to two is transformative. Patterns emerge. Comparisons become possible. Ideas get tested.

The two systems share some striking similarities. Both have a large central gap or cavity in their disk — about 70 au for PDS 70, and a prominent 60 au gap for WISPIT 2 — and both have two confirmed gas giant planets with masses roughly comparable to Jupiter. In PDS 70, the planets orbit at about 21 and 35 au. In WISPIT 2, they orbit at about 57 and 14 au. These broadly similar mass and orbital ranges have led some researchers to speculate about what co-author Christian Ginski calls a possible "Goldilocks zone" for giant planet formation — a range of conditions, distances, and disk properties that seem to reliably produce large multi-planet architectures.

There are important differences too. WISPIT 2's disk is much more extended and structured than PDS 70's. While PDS 70 has a wide inner cavity hosting both planets, WISPIT 2 hosts WISPIT 2b in a gap between rings, with WISPIT 2c sitting within the inner region but outside the central cavity. The dust ring between the two WISPIT 2 planets remains intact — probably because they're too far apart to collectively clear the material between them. In PDS 70, by contrast, the two tightly-spaced planets appear to have consumed that inter-planetary material early on, leaving a clean, wide cavity.

Could There Be a Third Planet Hiding in the Disk?

Here's where it gets even more exciting. Beyond WISPIT 2b, the multi-ringed disk shows at least one additional gap — narrower and shallower than the others. "We suspect there may be a third planet carving out this gap," lead author Chloe Lawlor said in a statement from ESO. "Potentially of Saturn mass, owing to the gap being much narrower and shallower."

A Saturn-mass planet would be smaller and fainter than WISPIT 2b or 2c. That makes it harder to detect with current instruments. But the field won't have to wait forever. ESO's Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), currently under construction on Cerro Armazones in Chile's Atacama Desert, will be the largest optical and infrared telescope ever built when it comes online. Its 39-metre primary mirror will give it the resolution and light-collecting power to directly image even smaller, fainter forming planets. The WISPIT 2 system is already at the top of astronomers' target lists.

🔭 Did you know? The ELT's primary mirror is composed of 798 individual hexagonal segments. When operational, it will gather 13 times more light than the VLT — enough to detect the thermal glow of a Saturn-mass planet forming 437 light-years away.

What This Means for Our Own Origins

Let's take a step back and think about what we're really looking at. WISPIT 2 is a young solar analogue — a star that, right now, resembles what our own Sun looked like roughly 4.5 billion years ago. And around it, two gas giants are forming in a multi-ringed disk that looks remarkably like what models predict our early solar system's disk to have been. "WISPIT 2 is the best look into our own past that we have to date," said Chloe Lawlor.

That's not a casual claim. It means that by studying how WISPIT 2b and WISPIT 2c interact with the surrounding disk — how they carve their gaps, how they accumulate mass, how their orbits evolve — we can test theories about how Jupiter and Saturn formed. And Jupiter and Saturn didn't just happen to be big. Their formation sculpted the entire solar system. They deflected asteroids, shaped the orbits of the inner rocky planets, and possibly delivered water to early Earth via comets they scattered inward. Without Jupiter, we might not be here.

There are two main competing theories for how gas giants form. In core accretion, a rocky core builds up slowly from smaller planetesimals until it's massive enough to gravitationally collapse surrounding gas. In gravitational instability, a massive disk can fragment directly into a planet without the need for a rocky core first. WISPIT 2 offers the chance to test both theories in a system that closely mirrors our own — and may eventually tell us which mechanism built Jupiter.

Co-author Christian Ginski put it well: "WISPIT 2 gives us a critical laboratory not just to observe the formation of a single planet but an entire planetary system." That's the kind of opportunity that comes along maybe twice in a generation of astronomers. And we're living in it right now.

Our Final Thought: A Mirror Across Time

Two planets. One young star. Four hundred and thirty-seven light-years away. And yet, this story is about us — about every rocky world that ever formed, every ocean that ever filled, every mind that ever looked up and wondered why it exists.

The WISPIT 2 system gives us something precious: a live feed from our own past. WISPIT 2b, at ~4.9 Jupiter masses and 57 au from its star, and WISPIT 2c, at 8–12 Jupiter masses and just 14 au out, are building themselves right now — scooping up disk material, carving rings, possibly nudging a third Saturn-mass sibling into formation farther out. The GRAVITY+ instrument made this confirmation possible, reading a chemical fingerprint in the K-band spectrum of a planet 437 light-years away. Science, at its most astonishing.

At FreeAstroScience.com, we don't just share discoveries — we protect you from misinformation. In a world full of sensationalism and half-truths, we trace every claim back to the peer-reviewed source. What you've read here comes directly from Lawlor et al. (2026), published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, and from the ESO announcement of March 23, 2026. No speculation dressed as fact. No hype for clicks. Just science, clearly told.

Come back to FreeAstroScience.com whenever the universe does something astonishing — which, frankly, is all the time. Keep that mind of yours wide open. The cosmos rewards curiosity like nothing else can.

✎ Editor's Self-Critique: Bias Check & Gaps

• Attribution nuance: Early media reports credited Chloe Lawlor with the discovery of WISPIT 2b, but the primary arXiv paper (2603.22085) clarifies that WISPIT 2b was led by Richelle van Capelleveen (Leiden Observatory, 2025). We have corrected this here — but readers should be aware that some other outlets may not have done so yet.
• Mass uncertainty: The 8–12 M₇ range for WISPIT 2c is derived from luminosity-mass isochrones and carries the uncertainty of the system's age (3.8–7.5 Myr). Atmospheric model grids suggest a broader range of 3–16 M₇. We used the isochrone-based range as it's considered more robust by the authors.
• Orbital direction: The paper notes some inconsistency between SPHERE H-band data (suggesting prograde orbit) and literature z'-band and L-band data (possibly retrograde). We reported the more likely prograde scenario, as the authors themselves favour it — but we acknowledge more astrometry is needed.
• Sample size limitation: With only two confirmed two-planet forming systems (WISPIT 2 and PDS 70), statistical comparisons remain preliminary. The "Goldilocks zone" hypothesis is speculative and not a confirmed scientific consensus.

References & Sources

1. Lawlor, C. et al. (2026). Direct Spectroscopic Confirmation of the Young Embedded Protoplanet WISPIT 2c. The Astrophysical Journal Letters. arxiv.org/abs/2603.22085
2. van Capelleveen, R. F. et al. (2025). A Gap-clearing Planet in a Multi-ringed Disk around WISPIT 2. The Astronomical Journal. Referenced in Lawlor et al. (2026).
3. ESO Press Release (2026, March 23). Two Planets Spotted Forming Around Young Star in Aquila. eso.org/public/news/eso2602/
4. Phys.org (2026, March 24). A solar system in the making? Two planets spotted forming in disk around young star. phys.org/news/2026-03-solar-planets-disk-young-star.html
5. The Journal.ie (2026, March 23). Galway student leads team to discovery of new planet. thejournal.ie
6. Keppler, M. et al. (2018). Discovery of a planetary-mass companion within the gap of the transition disk around PDS 70. Astronomy & Astrophysics. DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/201832957
7. Haffert, S. Y. et al. (2019). Two accreting protoplanets as the origin of the gas emission in the circumbinary disk of HD 142527. Nature Astronomy. DOI: 10.1038/s41550-019-0780-5
8. Universiteit Leiden (2026, March). Two planets-in-formation discovered around young star WISPIT 2. universiteitleiden.nl