More and more extraterrestrial worlds spotted in a "planet nursery" surrounding a young star

Astronomers captured a remarkable image of two growing exoplanets surrounding a young star.

According to a statement released by the researchers, the newborn planets gravitationally dig a vast space in "a disk forming the planet" surrounding the 6 million year old star. Space.com reports that the two growing worlds are narrowing the gap in the "disk" of gas and dust around the star, which is slightly smaller than our Sun.

The host star, PDS 70, is about 370 light-years from Earth. A light-year, measuring distance in space, equates to 6,000 billion kilometers. PDS 70b, the most recently discovered planet, is located in "disk space" about 2 billion kilometers from its star. PDS 70c, the other newly discovered planet, is about 3.3 billion kilometers from the star, a distance similar to that of the Sun by Neptune.

The study is published in the journal Nature Astronomy. "The discovery of these two worlds is significant because it provides direct evidence that planet formation can extract enough material from a protoplanetary disk to create an observable space," say the scientists.

Exoplanets PDS 70b and c (ESO and S. Haffert ([Leiden Observatory])

According to researchers, although more than a dozen exoplanets were directly imaged, it is only the second time that a multi-planetary system is photographed.

"This is the first unambiguous detection of a two-planet system digging up disk space," added Julien Girard of the Baltimore Institute of Space Telescope Science, Maryland, one of the co-authors of the study. With facilities such as ALMA [the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array in northern Chile], Hubble, or large ground-based optical telescopes with adaptive optics, we see disks with rings and empty spaces. The open question was: are there any planets out there? In this case, the answer is yes. "

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PDS 70c was spotted from the ground using the MUSE spectrograph on the very large telescope (VLT) of the European European Observatory in Chile. Astronomers used a new mode of observation on the telescope that allowed it to "lock" the light emitted by hydrogen. "This new mode of observation has been developed to study galaxies and star clusters at higher spatial resolution. But this new mode is also suitable for exoplanet imaging, which was not the original scientific engine of the MUSE instrument, "said Sebastiaan Haffert of Leiden Observatory, lead author of the document. "We were very surprised when we found the second planet,"

Experts hope NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, due to be launched in 2021, will provide more details about the system and other "planetary nurseries".

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In a separate project earlier this year, scientists released the very first picture of a black hole, revealing the distant object in breathtaking detail.

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