In earthly terms, it's as old as the hills but - in the stellar scheme of things - one million years is a mere babe in arms.
So when Nasa scientists announced yesterday they had found the youngest planet known to man, the new arrival was greeted with great excitement by stargazers. "It knocked our socks off," admitted Ed Churchwell, astronomer at the University of Wisconsin.
A telltale gap in the Taurus constellation, 420 light years from Earth, spied through Nasa's infrared Spitzer space telescope, was enough to prove the existence of a gaseous planet less than a million years old.
Compared to the youngest planets known before now, which are several billion years old - and the earth itself, which is thought to be more than 4.5 billion years old - it represented a planetary body in its infancy.
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/science_technology/story.jsp?story=526055