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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 disk of gas and dust of a star. 19659002] The discovery, published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics and made with the Long Range Telescope (VLT) has managed to capture the planet by dividing a path through the material that surrounds the star, and d & # 39; where these types of stars usually form.
Detection was possible thanks to the SPHERE instrument installed in the VLT of the Southern European Observatory (ESO), one of the most powerful search instruments for planets of the moment, used to study this type of celestial bodies by a technique known as a high-contrast image
This method, with the help of a chronograph – a mask that blocks the blinding light of the central star and allows the detection of objects around – facilitated the capture and measurement of the brightness of the planet, which allowed 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 3,000 million kilometers from the central star, a distance equivalent to that between Uranus and the sun.
The badysis also shows that the PDS 70b is a giant planet formed of gas with a few times mbad of Jupiter and a surface temperature of about 1000 degrees Celsius, much hotter than n '. any planet in the solar system.
"After more than a decade of tremendous effort to build this high-tech machine, now SPHERE allows us to recover what has been sown with the discovery of baby planets!" Recalled Thomas Henning , director of the Max Planck Institute of Astronomy and Equipment
For Miriam Keppler, the team leader after the discovery, although the records of the young stars are the places from birth to the planets, "until now, only a handful of observations have detected signs of planets."
"We needed to observe a planet in the disk. a young star to truly understand the processes of planetary formation, "commented another author, André Müller.
The discovery has already deepened initial observations, until the obtaining of A specter of the planet, which allowed us to conclude that s the atmosphere was cloudy
With the results obtained and the badysis of atmospheric and physical properties of the planet, astronomers will be able to advance in the explanations Theories on the phenomenon of planetary formation in space.
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