A popular astronomical theory states that large planets don't exist around young stars because planets of significant mass take too long to form.

However, a team of astronomers announced on Thursday that they have indeed found a giant planet orbiting a star so young, it is still surrounded by remnants of the disk of gas and dust that formed it.

"For decades, conventional wisdom held that large Jupiter-mass planets take a minimum of 10 million years to form," said team member Christopher Johns-Krull, an astronomer from Rice Unversity. "That's been called into question over the past decade, and many new ideas have been offered, but the bottom line is that we need to identify a number of newly formed planets around young stars if we hope to fully understand planet formation."

Planet much larger than anything in our solar system

Described in a report set to be published by the Astrophysical Journal, the newly-discovered planet is about eight times bigger than Jupiter and has been called CI Tau b. The planet circles a 2 million-year-old star in the constellation Taurus, located around 450 light years from Earth.

CI Tau b is in a very tight orbit around its star, circling once every nine days. The planet was discovered with the radial velocity technique, a planet-hunting process that uses slight distinctions in the velocity of a star to figure out the gravitational pull applied by nearby planets that are too weak to see directly with a telescope. The discovery was the culmination of a survey started in 2004 of 140 candidate stars.