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Astronomers have discovered for the first time the presence of a disk around a planet beyond our solar system.
Using the Atacama Large Millimeter / Submillimeter Array (ALMA), of which the European Southern Observatory (ESO) is an international partner, scientists have discovered the circumplanetary disk that surrounds the exoplanet PDS 70c.
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PDS 70c is one of two “Jupiter-like” giant planets orbiting a star nearly 400 light years away, according to a statement released by ESO on Thursday.
PDS70c and PDS 70b were discovered in 2019 and 2019, respectively, using ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT). PDS 70b does not show “clear evidence” of a circumplanetary disk.
Although there have been signs of such a region of “moon formation” around the exoplanet before, the researchers were unable to differentiate the disc from its surroundings.
“Our work presents a clear detection of a disk in which satellites could form,” said the University of Grenoble and Myriam Benisty of the University of Chile, who led the research published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. “Our ALMA observations were obtained at such exquisite resolution that we were able to clearly identify that the disk is associated with the planet and we are able to constrain its size for the first time.”
Benisty and his colleagues discovered that the disc is approximately the same diameter as our sun’s distance from Earth, which is roughly 94 million miles.
In addition, the disc has sufficient mass to form up to three moon-sized satellites, which have a radius of about 1,080 miles.
The results will also help understand when, where and how planets and moons form in young star systems.
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The planets are thought to start off as dust grains smaller than the width of human hair before emerging from the gas and dust disks that surround young stars before gravity causes a gentle collision and a merger of the stars. materials inside the disc before the dust particles combine to form tiny planets or “planetesimals.”
Planetesimals orbit their star, clearing matter out of their way as the star absorbs nearby gas and repels distant matter. before forming new worlds billions of years later.
It was believed that gas giants were created where the disk was colder – and the gas molecules would slow down enough – and water could freeze, fragments of ice and dust eventually forming giant planetary cores.
The hottest areas of the disc aided the formation of rocky planets tens of millions of years after the star was born and after the formation of frozen giants, although details regarding where the planets form in disks are still an area of research, according to NASA.
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ESO notes that as planets take shape around young stars, they can potentially acquire their own circumplanetary disk which contains gas and dust that can form larger and larger bodies through collisions that lead to the formation of moons.
In the future, the observatory intends to use the Medium Infrared ELT Imager and Spectrograph (METIS) of its Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) to better understand planetary systems, or assemblages of gravitationally related objects that orbit a star.
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