WISPIT

Wide Separation Planets in Time

Encouraged by our success with the YSES survey, we expanded our parameter search to include all young stars across the sky visible from the VLT, and ended up with a sample of 180 stars covering ages from 2 Myr up to 20 Myr.

The Wide Separation Planets in Time (WISPIT) survey is being carried out over several periods since 2022, and to date (Jen 2026) has produced two exoplanet systems.

WISPIT 1b and 1c

WISPIT 1 is a stellar binary with a primary star of around one solar mass, with two comoving companions identified as gas giant exoplanets (van Capelleveen et al., 2025).

WISPIT 2

We detected a spectacular circumstellar disk which has several cleared rings within it. The widest ring has a protoplanet of about 5 Jupiter masses (van Capelleveen et al., 2025), and is detected as a point source in the optical Hydrogen alpha line indicating that is is undergoing acitve accretion within this cavity (Close et al., 2025).

References

2025

  1. 2025A&A...704A.221V.png
    WIde Separation Planets In Time (WISPIT): Two directly imaged exoplanets around the Sun-like stellar binary WISPIT 1
    Richelle F. van Capelleveen, Matthew A. Kenworthy, Christian Ginski, Eric E. Mamajek, Alexander J. Bohn, Rico Landman, and 4 more authors
    A&A, Dec 2025
    DOI PDF
  2. 2025ApJ...990L...8V.png
    WIde Separation Planets In Time (WISPIT): A Gap-clearing Planet in a Multi-ringed Disk around the Young Solar-type Star WISPIT 2
    Richelle F. van Capelleveen, Christian Ginski, Matthew A. Kenworthy, Jake Byrne, Chloe Lawlor, Dan McLachlan, and 14 more authors
    ApJL, Sep 2025
    DOI PDF
  3. 2025ApJ...990L...9C.png
    Wide Separation Planets in Time (WISPIT): Discovery of a Gap Hα Protoplanet WISPIT 2b with MagAO-X
    Laird M. Close, Richelle F. van Capelleveen, Gabriel Weible, Kevin Wagner, Sebastiaan Y. Haffert, Jared R. Males, and 31 more authors
    ApJL, Sep 2025
    DOI PDF