The first snapshot of a planet in formation around another star has validated new technology used by University of Hawaii astronomers on Mauna Kea.

At about 2 million years old, the so-called "protoplanet" is also by far the youngest ever discovered, UH officials said in an announcement Wednesday.

UH astronomer Adam Kraus presented his data on the planet, called LkCa 15 b, at a meeting Wednesday at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

The discovery marks a milestone in the new field of direct imaging of "exoplanets," or planets around other stars. Earlier, the presence of planets had to be deduced by minute disturbances of gravity around the host star.

"The technology is advancing pretty rapidly," Kraus said in a telephone interview from Maryland. "But we’re really still at the dawn of being able to directly image planets around other stars."

Images taken from the Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea show that the planet-in-the-making is sucking up relatively cooler gas and dust from a surrounding cloud. The nearby star, in the constellation Taurus, is about 450 light years away, Kraus said.

"LkCa 15 b is the youngest planet ever found, about five times younger than the previous record holder," Kraus said. "This young gas giant is being built out of the dust and gas. In the past, you couldn’t measure this kind of phenomenon because it’s happening so close to the star. But for the first time, we’ve been able to directly measure the planet itself as well as the dusty matter around it."

Kraus, along with colleague Michael Ireland of Macquarie University in Sydney and the Australian Astronomical Observatory, found the planetary infant using the twin, 10-meter Keck telescopes, which have high-tech optics that cancel out the distortion of the atmosphere, and a technique called aperture mask interferometry.

Aperture mask interferometry involves placing a plate with several holes in the path of the light collected, which allows astronomers to cancel out the bright light of stars.

"This seems like a promising technique going forward," Kraus said.

"Interferometry has actually been around since the 1800s, but through the use of adaptive optics has only been able to reach nearby young suns for about the last seven years," Ireland said in a UH announcement. "Since then we’ve been trying to push the technique to its limits using the biggest telescopes in the world, especially Keck."

The discovery of LkCa 15 b began as a survey of 150 young dusty stars in star-forming regions. A dozen stars became the focus of more concentrated study.

LkCa 15 b was the second target.

"We realized we had uncovered a super Jupiter-sized gas planet, but that we could also measure the dust and gas surrounding it," Kraus said. "We’d found a planet at its very beginning."

The research will be published in the Nov. 20 edition of the Astrophysical Journal.