When You Hold Them Together

Bernardi and Cieza confirmed Elias 2-24 b. Youngest known planet so far: under a million years, Jupiter’s mass, still taking from the disk around Elias 2-24 about four hundred fifty light-years out.

It sits in a gap ALMA already mapped; VLT put a glow there; the paper argued for a decade whether that was allowed.

Models want about five million years to grow a Jupiter at Jupiter’s distance, longer farther out. This one is already at fifty-five Earth-orbits.

Confirmation came from old Keck coronagraph frames, twenty eighteen and twenty twenty, stitched until the point walked like a planet.

Baby is a late mouth — same family as residual, starless, fairy lights. Newborn is a late mouth. Looking is the point that already sat in the cut before the name arrived.

In the Gap already has that. The leftover is both: the model years that have not arrived while the mass already sits, and the archive frames that only become motion when you hold them together.