A planet that is forming around a star 553 light years away was accidently discovered by scientists. A team of researchers at Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), US, looked for details of a protoplanetary disk that was present

around a star known as HD 100546. A protoplanetary disk is a massive disk of material orbiting a newborn star and has a great potential of forming a planetary system.

A technique, called spectro-astrometry, aided the researchers to study warm gas within the disk and track changes that were happening in even one-minute interval.

The team came across an additional source of gaseous emissions from carbon monoxide molecules that were thought to be coming not from the disk alone. Over the years, the researchers endeavored to calculate the changes in velocity and position of the extra emission, and reached at the conclusion that it was regularly orbiting the star. The study results have provided strong evidence that what they are observing is the hot gas that usually surrounds a very young planet.

The researchers confirmed their hypothesis through computer model, which also helped them investigate extra emissions. Now, it is believed that the source of the gas is a small circumplanetary disk of hot gas orbiting a forming planet. The forming planet is most likely to emerge as a gas giant and has three times as much mass as Jupiter.

The researchers gathered data from observations taken in 2003, 2006, 2010, and 2013 with the help of the Gemini Observatory and the Very Large Telescope at the European Southern Observatory.

The study results strongly indicate that the researchers are actually observing a disk of hot gas surrounding a forming giant planet in orbit around the star.

"While such circumplanetary disks have been theorized to surround giant planets at birth and to control the flow of gas onto the growing planet, these findings are the first observational evidence for their existence", said John Carr, a scientist at the U. S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL).