Scientists have uncovered what's being described as the "youngest fully formed exoplanet ever found," a planet billed as 500 light-years from earth.

The discovery has raised a plethora of questions about how the planet was formed and how it could shockingly come to be so quickly.

Reports are researchers first discovered the planet while using the Kepler space telescope currently known to be orbiting the earth. Its star is estimated to be no more than 10 million years old, fueling widespread speculation that the planet is someone in that same age range.

"Our Earth is roughly 4.5 billion years old," Trevor David, a graduate student researcher at the California Institute of Technology and lead author of the new study, said in a statement. "By comparison, the planet K2-33b is very young. You might think of it as an infant."

NASA Jet Propulsion Lab officials added in a statement that most of the more than 3,000 confirmed planets around other stars orbit are estimated to be much older, offering researchers a much anticipated chance to monitor the planet through many of the earlier stages of its development.

Coupled with its youth, researchers noted the planet's close proximity to its star is a spellbinding feature of the newly found system. Among the astronomical theories explain the rise of the planet are a much quicker migration than what's customary in a process called disk migration.

"After the first discoveries of massive exoplanets on close orbits about 20 years ago, it was immediately suggested that they could absolutely not have formed there," David said. "But in the past several years, some momentum has grown for in situ formation theories [that the planet could form right where it is], so the idea is not as wild as it once seemed."

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