Galway PhD student on what led to her discovery of new exoplanet

‘Wispit 2C’ is estimated to be about 5m years old and most likely 10 times the mass of Jupiter.

Galway native Chloe Lawlor has discovered a new planet – the second one to be found forming near an infant star called ‘Wispit 2’, some 437 light years away.

As a child, Lawlor wanted to be an artist, she tells SiliconRepublic.com. However, she changed her mind once she joined university. “I moved into physics because I did like physics in school, so I thought, ‘Oh, maybe I’ll just try this out.’”

The 25-year-old says discoveries such as these feed the innate curiosity humans have in wanting to know how we came to be, how we evolved and why we are here. Lawlor is a PhD student at the University of Galway’s Centre for Astronomy at the School of Natural Sciences and the Ryan Institute.

She is working in collaboration with project lead Richelle van Capelleveen, a PhD student from Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands, and postdoctoral researcher Guillaume Bourdarot from the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany, to learn more about young planets and how they’re forming.

“Most of the planets that we’ve observed have been much older,” Lawlor says. “We don’t know how they get to those sort of final stages like something like our solar system. This is really key for these formation theories and it’s hopefully going to tell us a lot about these young systems, how they’re forming, and then how they evolve.”

Lawlor’s new discovery, an exoplanet named ‘Wispit 2C’, is thought to be about 5m years old. ‘Wispit 2B’, a nearby planet, was discovered last year by van Capelleveen and Dr Laird Close from the University of Arizona.

Both these exoplanets are at early stages of formation in the disc around Wispit 2, which is located in the Constellation of the Eagle, a prominent equatorial constellation visible in the northern hemisphere summer along the Milky Way.

Lawlor’s discovery makes Wispit 2 the second known young and still forming multi-planet system. The only other system yet discovered with more than one planet developing is PDS 70, some 400 light years away from Earth.

Wispit 2C is a gas giant, likely around 10 times the mass of Jupiter. It is twice as massive as Wispit 2B and orbits four-times closer to its host star, which makes it incredibly difficult to detect with ground-based telescopes.

Wispit 2B and Wispit 2C forming around Wispit 2. Image: ESO/C Lawlor, R F van Capelleveen et al.

The exoplanet was detected using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile’s Atacama desert. By linking several telescopes together to act as one giant instrument, the research team was able to observe regions very close to the star. In their analysis, the team was able to detect carbon monoxide gas, a chemical commonly found in the atmospheres of young giant planets.

Lawlor said earlier this week: “At first, we weren’t sure if it was a planet or a very large dust clump. We very quickly made follow-up observations using the Very Large Telescope Interferometer, an incredible setup where multiple telescopes can be connected to form a large virtual telescope.

“This allowed us to take what we call a spectrum, which is essentially a chemical fingerprint revealing the elements and molecules in an object’s atmosphere.”

Lawlor led the study, which has been published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Prof Frances Fahy, director of the Ryan Institute, said: “The discovery of the planet Wispit 2C is a remarkable achievement and highlights the world-class astrophysics research taking place at University of Galway.”

The team will continue on with their efforts to hopefully find more planets in the system.

Last year, a study from Scotland’s University of St Andrews showed how giant free-floating planets could make their own miniature planetary systems without needing a star to orbit around. In a different study from 2025, scientists – for the first time – observed the very early stages of the creation of a new solar system around a baby star.

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