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Astronomers have published images of a nascent system with two planets forming around a young star, a little smaller than the Sun. This is the first time that a pair of planets orbiting the same star has been spotted while it was still in the making.
The photos provide insight into the birth of the planet and show the gas planets, called PDS 70b and PDS 70c, accumulating matter inside a disk of dust and gas surrounding their host star, the PDS 70.
This is only the second time that a multi-planetary system is photographed in its toddler state and the first time for a two-planet system.
"This is the first unambiguous detection of a two-planet system digging a disk space", Julien Girard of the Institute of Space Telescope Sciences in Baltimore, Maryland, co-authored the study, said in a statement.
Although the PDS 70b, the largest of the pair, was discovered last year, his companion, the PDS 70c, was unknown to scientists before. Twice as far from its star as the PDS 70b, the PDS 70c is perhaps less massive than the PDS 70b, but it is far from lightweight in planetary terms. The PDS 70c weighs up to 10 times the mass of Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system, itself two and a half times heavier than all the other planets in the solar system combined.
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"We were very surprised when we found the second planet" Sebastiaan Haffert of the Leiden Observatory, lead author of the study published in Nature Astronomy magazine, said Monday.
The PDS 70b is even larger, with a mass estimated at four to 17 times that of Jupiter.
This discovery was made possible by the MUSE (Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer) spectrograph of the European Southern Observatory. The eight-meter giant telescope equipped with four lasers was used to provide high-resolution images of the process, which was previously concealed from the human eye because of the glow of the host star.
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Exoplanets like PDS 70b and PDS 70c, that is, planets gravitating around a star outside a solar system, were discovered each year. So far, there are 4,071 confirmed discoveries, so finding a new one is not a big deal. However, planetary nurseries are extremely rare. The researchers hope that with the development of the technology, they will soon be able to study these systems in more detail, for example by evaluating the temperature and density of the gas in the disc.
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