The team, led by Andrea Bernardi, a doctoral candidate at Chile's Universidad Diego Portales, examined archived observations of seven young stars captured with the coronagraph at the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii.

A coronagraph blocks the star's glare so dimmer objects nearby come into view. Each star sits inside a debris disk of dust, gas, and ice. The astronomers hunted for planets carving gaps in those disks.

"The planets should be found within the gaps, since they are carving them," Bernardi said. "And that's exactly where we found Elias 2-24 b."

The world is roughly Jupiter-mass. It sits about 55 times farther from its star than Earth is from the Sun — roughly 10 times Jupiter's distance from our own Sun. The system remains so young that the planet still orbits inside its dusty nursery disk.

Scientists now have a live view of a giant world mid-birth.

How did they confirm it?

Earlier work by ALMA and the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile had flagged a gap in the disk and a faint point of light inside it. Was that light really a planet?

Bernardi's team turned to the Keck Observatory Archive, a NASA-funded collaboration between Keck and the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute at Caltech/IPAC. They pulled the same object from observations taken in 2018 and 2020.

Tracking the dot's motion across years of data showed it moves with the star. That behavior fits a true orbiting planet, not a distant background source or an imaging artifact.

The confirmation came from archive data, not new telescope time. It saved years of waiting for fresh observations.

What's next?

Help is on the way. NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launched August 30, carrying an advanced coronagraph designed to spot planets drowned out by starlight.

Roman could find true Jupiter analogs — gas giants at Jupiter-like distances from their stars — that today stay hidden.

Elias 2-24 b orbits about 10 times farther out than such analogs would. Roman should reach those closer-in targets with ease.

"We usually hear about telescopes working separately, but this confirmation was possible only by using multiple telescopes together," Bernardi said. "Elias 2-24 b is at the limit of what current telescopes can detect, but with new instruments like NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, such detections should become easier."

"This is just the beginning of a new era of discovery," Cieza added. "It's incredible that with modern technology, we are actually able to see planet formation in action, and Roman will take planet hunting to the next level."

The galaxy hides thousands more baby planets. Roman will start pulling them into view.