ALMA images two planets still forming in one young disk
Space reported on 30 September 2026 that ALMA, an array of 66 radio antennas, had imaged two planets still forming in the gas-and-dust disk around the binary stars WISPIT 2, about 437 light-years away and an estimated 5.4 million years old. WISPIT 2b, a gas giant already about five times the mass of Jupiter, has opened a gap and is still gathering material at about 57 times the Earth-Sun distance, nearly twice Neptune's orbit. WISPIT 2c, less developed, has carved a cavity. The team describes WISPIT 2b as the only protoplanet where the disk, the planet, ongoing accretion, and gas interacting directly with the planet can be seen together, including gas swirls that simulations had predicted and that had not been imaged before.
The record ends here. Everything below this line is invented.
Part one
The Twins in the Disk
The picture had already been released. Nia was only a visiting writer with a hard hat and a borrowed chair, and the screen in front of her was a public image of a disk hundreds of light-years out, painted in false color so a person could stand to look at it.
She had come to see how a fact sits before anyone turns it into a sentence. The disk was a ring with a lane cut through it. Two knots, the caption said, were planets still gathering themselves. One sat far out and heavy, a gap opened in its track. The other was a cavity, younger in the way the write-up had put it, still pushing the gas aside. Between them the gas curled in hooks that models had drawn for years and the sky had only just agreed to show.
She copied the hooks onto the back of a visitor badge, badly. Her pencil slipped, and the two knots seemed to lean toward each other, as if the outer one were passing the inner one a handful of dust. She knew the lean was graphite, not gravity. Under the sketch she wrote "made up," small enough to miss, and pinned the badge inside her notebook. The measurements stayed on the screen. The lean stayed in the paper, where it belonged.
What’s real
- ALMA imaged two planets forming around WISPIT 2.
- WISPIT 2b is about five times the mass of Jupiter.
- Gas swirls predicted by simulations were imaged for the first time.
What’s invented
- Nia, her visit and the badge.
- The two planets leaning toward each other.
- Dust passing from one planet to the other.
Part two: What the Pencil Lean Was For
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Filed under space, exoplanets, alma, planet formation.