Astronomers have caught a rare cosmic moment: a planet in the middle of being born. The infant world, named WISPIT 2b, is forming in a ring of gas and dust around its parent star, WISPIT 2, about 437 light-years from Earth. Using the Magellan Telescope in Chile and the Large Binocular Telescope in Arizona, researchers managed to glimpse the planet right inside the very gap it's carving out for itself. At only five million years old, it's practically an infant in cosmic terms — a planetary newborn still covered in space dust.

But WISPIT 2b is a hefty newborn, roughly five times the mass of Jupiter, and observations show it nestled neatly in the protoplanetary disk, pulling in material and reshaping its surroundings. The European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope first spotted the ringlike bands, while Magellan's MagAO-X system detected the telltale H-alpha glow — hydrogen gas heating as it spirals onto the planet's surface, a sign that the baby world is still feeding heartily, and on its way to becoming an even more gigantic gas world.

The findings, published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, give astronomers a rare glimpse of how worlds begin. Pictured above is an artist's concept of WISPIT 2b accreting matter as it orbits within a gap surrounding its parent star.