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Astronomers have captured the unprecedented cliché of a "baby-planet" born about 370 light-years from Earth. Called PDS 70b, this protoplanet formed within the disk of gas and dust that surrounds its star. In addition to the exceptional nature of its discovery, PDS 70b opens the way to a better understanding of planetary formation.
It's a beautiful baby! Many times the mbad of Jupiter. A newborn of a kind a bit special, since it is … a planet! And not just any gaseous giant whose surface temperature is around 1,000 ° C, much hotter than any other planet in our Solar System. And for good reason, its birth took place about 370 light-years away from us, among the stars of the constellation Centaurus. Baptismal name of this young planet? PDS 70b.
She owes this surname to that of her sister, PDS 70, an orange dwarf star surrounded by a protoplanetary disk made of gas and dust, which intrigued scientists after its discovery in 2012. Since then, researchers The Max Planck Institute for Astronomy and the European Southern Observatory kept observing it from every angle, with the hope of finding a "baby-planet". A dream realized today as revealed by two studies published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics .
A state-of-the-art instrument dedicated to the search for planets
The day of PDS 70b was made possible thanks to a state-of-the-art instrument: SPHERE – for Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast Exoplanet REsearch – one of the most powerful planetary search tools in the world. Large telescope, located in Chile
Main badet of the device: a specific element – the coronograph – which allowed the researchers to hide the blinding glare of the central star, and thus to observe the much weaker glow of the disc that surrounds it. Thanks to this device, the scientists were able to capture the exceptional cliché showing PDS 70b only a few times after the beginning of its formation, about three billion kilometers from the center of its star, the equivalent of the distance between Uranus and the Sun.
A scientific achievement of the team's director, Miriam Keppler, of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy: " These discs around young stars are the birthplace of planets, but until now only a handful of observations have been able to detect evidence of baby-planets within them ".
A giant step for astronomy
The discovery of PDS 70b marks a considerable advance in the field of the observation of protoplanets. Especially since the researchers are not stopped at the simple capture of a snapshot of the newborn. A second team worked on studying the light spectrum to find out more about its properties. The main result of these investigations: the atmosphere of the planet would be clouded …
This information on the atmospheric properties of the proto-planet will now allow researchers to test different theoretical models of formation of planets, as emphasized l principal author of the second study, André Müller: " These results offer us a new insight into the early stages of planetary evolution, complex and poorly understood.We had to observe a planet in the disk of a young star to really understand the processes underlying the formation of planets ". A superb birth picture which certainly inaugurates a family album to be expanded.
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