Astrnomos captures for the first time the birth of an exoplanet in a dusty environment

Many exoplanets – planets orbiting a star that is not the Sun – have already been spotted by researchers, including some similar to Earth or the same size. However, scientists have announced that they have been lucky enough to observe an exoplanet in the middle of their training.

A dust disk was detected in the PDS 70 star, which is located in the Centaurus constellation, 460 light years from Earth. The SPHERE, a very large telescope equipment, was used to record it. Astronomers have long known that planets are born in the form of large disks like this, but this is the first time that the phenomenon is detected by our equipment.

Miriam Keppler, a student in astronomy at the Max Planck Institute in Germany in Gizmodo that these discs "are made of gas and dust and surround young stars up to a life of about 10 millions of years. "

The interesting fact of our discovery is that here we have an exceptionally robust detection of a young planet,

Since 1992, scientists had already suspected that the PDS 70 could have a protoplanetary disk, and in 2006 it was located, but the researchers still had to continue to examine this area until SPHERE allowed them to observe the planet. The old and new data show the distinct presence of a planet that leaves behind a trace.

Baptized PDS 70b, the new planet is a gaseous concert, with mbad of sometimes the mbad of Jupiter. Its surface has a temperature of about 1000º C, that is to say that it is much hotter than any planet in our solar system – even if it is located at about three billion kilometers from his young star, which would be approximately the distance between Uranus and the Sun.

In the video below, you will see the dust disk and the planetary formation in the form of a bright spot to the right of the center. The dark circle in the middle of the image is due to the use of a mask that blocks the light from the central star, allowing the detection of the disc and the planet.

In order to obtain the transmitted signal and provide an image of the visible planet, SPHERE had to use observation strategies, complicated data processing techniques and numerical algorithms.

"After more than a decade of tremendous effort to build this high-tech machine, SPHERE now allows us to reap the rewards of this work by giving us the discovery of baby planets!" Thomas Henning, director of the Max Planck Institute of Astronomy