Astronomers capture the first image of the newborn planet | Science and Health

A team of astronomers led by a group of the Max Planck Institute of Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany, captured the first image of a young planet, called PDS 70b, formed around the gaseous and dusty circle of a star. The discovery, published in the journal "Astronomy & Astrophysics" on Monday (2) and held with VLT of the European Southern Observatory (ESO), a large ensemble of optical telescopes that managed to model the planet through matter that surrounds the star, and from which these stars usually form.

Mask applied to the telescope

The detection was made possible by the instrument called SPHERE, which was installed in the VLT and serves to study this type of celestial bodies with a technique of image to strong contrast.

This method, badociated with a chronograph – a mask that blocks the blinding light of the central star and allows the detection of planetary objects – facilitates the capture and measurement of the brightness of the planet, allowing us to better understand its atmospheric properties.

The resulting image reflects a bright spot to the right of a dark center – a consequence of the use of the chronograph, located about 3 billion kilometers from the central star, a distance equivalent to that between Uranus and the sun.

The badysis also shows that PDS 70b is a giant planet composed of gas with a mbad several times larger than that of Jupiter and a surface temperature of about 1000 degrees centigrade, much hotter than that from any planet of the Solar System

"After more than a decade of tremendous effort to build this high-tech machine, SPHERE now allows us to reap the rewards of the discovery of planets newborn! " Recalled Thomas Henning, director of the Max Planck Institute for According to Miriam Keppler, team leader after the discovery, although the circles of the young stars are the birthplaces of the planets, "up to present only few observations had detected indications of newborn planets "

".

"We needed to observe a planet in the disc of a young star to really understand the training processes planetary, "commented another author, André Müller.

The discovery has already deepened the initial observations, to the point to obtain a spectrum of the planet, which led to conclude that its atmosphere was cloudy.