Physicists discover a new clue to the formation of the planet

An international study conducted by the School of Physics and Astronomy of Monash discovered the first evidence of observing the existence of circumplanetary disks.

The study published in the Letters from the Astrophysical Journal focused on young planets still in training (usually a few million years old).

"Our research is helping us to understand how our 4.6 billion year old solar system was created and how we got there," said Dr. Valentin Christiaens, lead author of the I & # 39; study, postdoctoral researcher in astrophysics at Monash University.

The research team used the installation of the Very Large Telescope in Chile to obtain infrared images of different colors (wavelengths) from an emerging giant planet.

"We found the first evidence of a disk of gas and dust around it, called circumplanetary disk," said Dr. Christiaens.

"We think that the great moons of Jupiter and other gaseous giants were born in such a disk, so our work helps to explain the formation of planets in our solar system," he said.

Seeing the moons of Jupiter through a telescope, Galileo had been arrested at his time, because he had found that everything was not turning around the Earth and so we were not the center of the Universe .

Dr. Christiaens said the method used to get the results of the study was innovative.

A newborn planet was much more difficult to observe than the star in orbit. The glare of the star had to be removed from the images.

"The algorithm we developed could be used to extract weak signals from other complex data sets," said Dr. Christiaens.

The observed properties of these moons and other large moons of gaseous giants suggested that they were formed in a circumplanetary disk.

This prediction has been supported by theoretical calculations and numerical simulations of increasing complexity in recent decades.

"Despite intensive research, circumplanetary discs have so far escaped detection," said Dr. Christiaens.

"This first piece of evidence suggests that the theoretical models of giant planet formation are not far off."

"Our work adds another piece to the puzzle of the formation of giant planets, whose first piece was set by Galileo four centuries ago with the discovery of Jupiter's four major moons."

Associate Professor Daniel Price, co-author of the study, and also a member of the ARC, said that it was stunning to think that we can see planets being formed, using the world's largest telescope.

"This result is the culmination of a long search for circumplanetary disks, by various means and at different wavelengths," said Dr. Christopher Pinte, author of the Monash study. , ARC Future Fellow.