WISPIT-2b

How Assumption Became “Planet Caught in the Act”

The ScienceDaily article published on September 8, 2025, claims that astronomers have “caught a planet in the act of forming” around the star WISPIT-2. The story, based on work by Laird Close and Richelle van Capelleveen using the Magellan Telescope and other observatories, announces the discovery of WISPIT-2b, said to be five times the mass of Jupiter, glowing in hydrogen light as it gathers material. The impression is that a camera has photographed a planet being born. But the only observation reported is a faint H-alpha emission — the red glow produced when hydrogen atoms are excited — located inside a dusty gap in the star’s disk. Everything beyond that single emission line is interpretation derived from prior assumptions.

The language of ‘planet in formation’ is imposed, not observed. H-alpha emission does not uniquely point to a planet in formation. It can arise from processes within the disk itself, such as turbulence, colliding gas flows, or magnetic activity. While observers often leap to the ‘planet’ explanation, the physics of disks provides more than enough ways to produce the same signal. But because the prevailing model assumes that gaps in the disk are carved by planets, the glow is automatically interpreted as accretion onto a planetary body. In other words, the observation is filtered through the theory before it is even described. By the time ScienceDaily or other outlets report it, the interpretation has already been converted into a ‘fact’ for public consumption. What begins as a theory laced with assumptions ends up repeated as unquestionable truth, recycled uncritically by readers and even by scientists outside the specialty. Later, if anyone questions the narrative of random planet formation, they are simply pointed back to this very story as the ‘strong’ evidence.

And so the dog chases its own tail — speculation recycled as proof.

This kind of exaggeration is not unique to WISPIT-2. The same formula circulates again and again in astronomy reporting: every detection of gas, light, or dust is framed as a breakthrough glimpse of a star or planet being “born.” Press offices and outlets like ScienceDaily reuse the same script — turn a faint or ambiguous signal into a cosmic origin story, strip away caveats, and present speculation as fact. The pattern is so routine that the public comes to expect it, and each new headline appears to confirm the last, even though the underlying barriers in the theory still remain implausible, glossed over as the storyline proceeds.

The article also calls WISPIT-2 a ‘young star,’ but that label itself rests on assumption. There is no clock measuring stellar age. More fundamentally, no one knows how stars first came to be. The physics proposed to explain even a single star’s origin is implausible, yet we are asked to believe this same process somehow repeated itself trillions of times across the universe. The classification comes from a theory that says stars collapse at random from giant gas clouds, live with disks for only a few million years, and then disperse them. None of this has ever been observed, and even under our strictest simulations with carefully imposed conditions, the formation of a single star cannot be produced one time. Yet the narrative insists that nature accomplished this same feat trillions of times over. In reality, gas clouds tend to expand, not collapse; turbulence and magnetic fields resist inward fall; angular momentum would cause gas to spread into a disk, not neatly condense into a star. So even before the planet claim, the very age and origin of WISPIT-2 are theory-driven, not data-driven. What we actually know is that there is a luminous body with a dusty disk and a hydrogen glow. Calling it a “young star with a forming planet” sneaks in two unproven stories at once.

This matters because the accepted model of planet formation has never been demonstrated. Textbooks describe a long chain: dust particles collide to form pebbles, pebbles somehow leap the “meter barrier,” meter-sized objects grow into kilometer-scale planetesimals, planetesimals merge into embryos, embryos crash together to form protoplanets, and after repeated redistributions, full planets emerge. At each stage, the process breaks down. Dust clumps do not easily leap the “meter barrier”; collisions at that size tend to fragment rather than build. Runaway growth depends on conditions that have not been demonstrated in real disks. The “giant impact” story of Earth’s formation by collision with Theia remains speculative. And yet here, with WISPIT-2b, astronomers claim to have seen a five-Jupiter-mass planet actively forming, skipping all of those unsolved steps. The emission is treated as a shortcut past the unsolved barriers, as if the theoretical hurdles no longer exist once a press release can declare victory.

The issue is not that Close and van Capelleveen observed nothing of interest. A star with a dusty, multi-ringed disk and localized hydrogen emission is worth examining. But calling this “planet formation” is part of a just-so story. It is circular reasoning: the model says disks produce planets; a disk with gaps is seen; a glow is detected in the gap; therefore it must be a forming planet, which confirms the model. The conclusion imposed by the assumptions of the premise.

There is also the question of incentive. Researchers know that telescope time and funding flow toward bold claims. A cautious statement like “possible hydrogen emission in disk cavity” does not attract international headlines. A declaration of a planet being born does. Journalists likewise need clickable stories, and “planet caught in the act of forming” is irresistible. The result is a performance in which ambiguous light is transformed into a dramatic narrative, rewarding both the scientists and the press, while the public is given the illusion of certainty.

What ScienceDaily presents as the birth of a planet is better described as the birth of a headline. The claim that this is “planet formation” relies entirely on a materialist framework that needs to find confirmation of dust-to-planet accretion. The deeper problems of that framework remain untouched. The gaps in the theory are still there, no matter how many times a glow in the sky is repackaged as proof that the story is complete.

For readers who want to dig deeper into why these recycled headlines never hold up, I cover the real cracks in the story in my books:
📖 Natural Technology: The Theory of Everything — uncovering the evidence for design built into the structure of reality.
📖 War of Cosmogonies: Genesis, Science, and the Battle for Reality — exposing the hidden history and ideological battles that shaped the so-called scientific ‘consensus.’