[ad_1]
A team of astronomers, led by a group of Max Planck Institute of Astronomy of Heidelberg, in Germany captured the first image of a young planet, called PDS 70b, formed around the disk of gas and dust of a star.
The discovery, published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics and made with the long-range telescope (VLT) of Observatorio Austral Europeo (ESO), managed to capture the planet by dividing a path through the material that surrounds the star and from which these types of stars are generally formed
The detection was possible through the instrument ] Sphere installed in the VLT, one of the most powerful planet search instruments of the moment, which serves to study this type of celestial bodies by means of a technique known as the high contrast image name.
This method do, with the help of a chronograph – a mask that blocks the blinding light of the central star and allows to detect planetary objects – facilitate the capture and measurement of the brightness of the star, which allowed to better understand its atmospheric properties .
The image reflects a bright spot to the right of a dark center – consequence of the use of the chronograph – located approximately 3,000 million kilometers from the star central distance equivalent to that between Uranus and the Sun.
The badysis further shows that the PDS 70b is a giant planet formed by gas with a mbad of a few times that of Jupiter and a surface temperature of about 1000 degrees Celsius, much higher than any planet in the solar system
"After more than a decade and tremendous effort to build this high-tech machine, now Sphere allows us to collect what is sown with the discovery of small planets! "He remembers Thomas Henning director of the Institute Max Planck of Astronomy and team leader.
For Miriam Keppler, team leader after the discovery, despite the fact that the records of young stars were the places where they were born the planets, "up to here only a handful of observations have detected traces of baby planets. "
With the results obtained and the different properties of the celestial body astronomers will be able to advance in theoretical explanations on the phenomenon of formation planetary space . (I)
Source link
