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Assets that are inherited by a married person are separate property (i.e., owned and controlled by the inheriting spouse alone) unless it is commingled (e.g., money deposited into a joint account) or re-titled (e.g., real property) to include the married person’s spouse.
If so, the other spouse can acquire a community property or separate property interest in the inherited separate property asset. Such inherited assets may be a difficult issue when a married couple does estate planning.
Most married people do a single joint living trust into which they transfer their real property and non retirement investment accounts, especially the assets that they acquired together from marital earnings. Often that means the surviving spouse inherits all, or almost all, the deceased spouse’s share of the trust estate.
However, a married person’s inherited assets may require an exception, especially when the asset is co-owned with siblings (or other family) or when the married person has their own children from a prior marriage.
Inherited assets co-owned by siblings may be excluded by the siblings when doing their joint estate planning with their spouses. That is, the siblings themselves may either expect or agree to keep their own undivided share in co-owned inherited property exclusively within the family bloodline (i.e., excluding their spouses and any step children).
Consider siblings who inherit co-ownership in a family real estate or a family business. Such assets are regarded by the siblings as special assets for personal or economic reasons. The siblings may agree that such assets stay in their family bloodline. Perhaps each sibling does the necessary estate planning to ensure the outcome. Alternatively one or more siblings may be undecided and do nothing. Indecision can lead to unintended outcomes.
Consider the sibling who keeps an undivided fractional ownership interest in real property outside of their joint husband and wife living trust. The sibling’s accompanying will may likely leave everything outside the trust (excluding any retirement and bank accounts that pass automatically to death beneficiaries) to the couple’s joint trust. If so, the surviving spouse may have to probate the deceased spouse’s will to claim the real property interest, thus partly defeating the benefit of their probate avoidance joint living trust.
Moreover, the deceased sibling’s share may now perhaps, depending on the trust’s provisions, go to their surviving spouse who may then co-own the special assets with in-laws; thus also undoing the siblings’ agreement. Alternatively, a sibling may do no estate planning at all, in which case their surviving spouse and children jointly inherit their separate property assets, perhaps by probate.
If a married person has separate children whom they did not raise as minors, they often want their own children (and not step children) to inherit separate property, including inheritances, that they did not purchase with their spouse. That may entail the married person establishing a separate property trust to exclude their spouse from inheriting or controlling such assets. The separate property trust may provide possible lifetime benefits to the surviving spouse and either immediate or eventual distribution to the children, as drafted.
Alternatively, the assets may be included within the joint trust as the contributing spouse’s separate property assets. Such assets may pass at the contributing spouse’s death to that spouse’s own children (bypassing the surviving spouse), may be distributed to the children (of the contributing spouse) subject to a life estate for the surviving spouse, or else may be held in further trust for the lifetime benefit of the surviving spouse, with distribution to the children at her death.
What outcome is attained depends on whether or not appropriate estate planning and proper administration of the estate planning occur. The estate planning must be drafted in contemplation of what its eventual administration will require and mean at that time for those concerned.
The foregoing discussion is not legal advice.
Dennis A. Fordham, attorney, is a State Bar-Certified Specialist in estate planning, probate and trust law. His office is at 870 S. Main St., Lakeport, Calif. He can be reached at
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- Written by: Dennis Fordham
Researchers have discovered a young protoplanet called WISPIT 2b embedded in a ring-shaped gap in a disk encircling a young star.
While theorists have thought that planets likely exist in these gaps (and possibly even create them), this is the first time that it has actually been observed.
Researchers have directly detected — essentially photographed — a new planet called WISPIT 2b, labeled a protoplanet because it is an astronomical object that is accumulating material and growing into a fully-realized planet.
However, even in its "proto" state, WISPIT 2b is a gas giant about 5 times as massive as Jupiter. This massive protoplanet is just about 5 million years old, or almost 1,000 times younger than the Earth, and about 437 light-years from Earth.
Being a giant and still-growing baby planet, WISPIT 2b is interesting to study on its own, but its location in this protoplanetary disk gap is even more fascinating. Protoplanetary disks are made of gas and dust that surround young stars and function as the birthplace for new planets.
Within these disks, gaps or clearings in the dust and gas can form, appearing as empty rings. Scientists have long suggested that these growing planets are likely responsible for clearing the material in these gaps, pushing and scattering dusty disk material outwards and greeting the ring gaps in the first place.
Our own solar system was once just a protoplanetary disk, and it's possible that Jupiter and Saturn may have cleared ring gaps like this in that disk many, many years ago.
But despite continued observation of stars with these kinds of disks, there was never any direct evidence of a growing planet found in one of these ring gaps. That is, until now. As reported in this paper, WISPIT 2b was directly observed in one of the ring gaps around its star, WISPIT 2.
Another interesting aspect of this discovery is that WISPIT 2b appears to have formed where it was found, it didn't form elsewhere and move into the gap somehow.
The star WISPIT 2 was first observed using VLT-SPHERE (Very Large Telescope - Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast Exoplanet REsearch), a ground-based telescope in northern Chile operated by the European Southern Observatory. In these observations, the rings and gap around this star were first seen.
Following these observations of the system, researchers looked at WISPIT 2, and spotted the planet WISPIT 2b for the first time, using the University of Arizona's MagAO-X extreme adaptive optics system, a high-contrast exoplanet imager at the Magellan 2 (Clay) Telescope at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile.
This technology adds another unique layer to this discovery. The MagAO-X instrument captures direct images, so it didn't just detect WISPIT 2b, it essentially captured a photograph of the protoplanet.
The team used this technology to study the WISPIT 2 system in what is called H-alpha, or Hydrogen-alpha, light. This is a type of visible light that is emitted when hydrogen gas falls from a protoplanetary disk onto young, growing planets. This could look like a ring of super heated plasma circling the planet. This plasma emits the H-alpha light that MagAO-X is specially designed to detect (even if it is a very faint signal compared to the bright star nearby).
When looking at the system in H-alpha light, the team spotted a clear dot in one of the dark ring gaps in the disk around WISPIT 2. This dot? The planet WISPIT 2b.
In addition to observing the protoplanet's H-alpha emission using MagAO-X, the team also studied the protoplanet in other wavelengths of infrared light using the LMIRcam detector as part of the The Large Binocular Telescope Interferometer instrument on the University of Arizona's Large Binocular Telescope.
Fun facts
In addition to discovering WISPIT 2b, this team spotted a second dot in one of the other dark ring gaps even closer to the star WISPIT 2.
This second dot has been identified as another candidate planet that will likely be investigated in future studies of the system.
The discoverers
WISPIT-2b was discovered by a team led by University of Arizona astronomer Laird Close and Richelle van Capelleveen, an astronomy graduate student at Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands. This followed the recent discovery of the WISPIT 2 disk and ring system using the VLT, which was led by van Capelleveen.
This discovery was detailed in the paper "Wide Separation Planets in Time (WISPIT): Discovery of a Gap Hα Protoplanet WISPIT 2b with MagAO-X," published August 26, 2025 in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. A second paper led by van Capelleveen and the University of Galway published on the same day in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
This research was partially supported by a grant from the NASA eXoplanet Research Program. MagAO-X was developed in part by a grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation with support from the Heising-Simons Foundation.
Chelsea Gohd writes for NASA.
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- Written by: Chelsea Gohd
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