This is the first image we get from the birth of a planet

In recent years we have detected Thousands of exoplanets: There is nothing exciting about finding a distant star with several orbiting worlds. But today astronomers have announced that they could see an exoplanet in the middle of his training.

The PDS 70 star dust disc had already been detected by the SPHERE and NAOS-CONICA instruments of the Very Large Telescope and the image generator. Near infrared Coronagraphic Gemini, all located in Chile. But after re-badyzing the data and making more observations with SPHERE, the scientists found what they were looking for: solid evidence of a dust spot.

"The planets are born in circumstellar discs, which consist of gas and dust that surround young stars for about 10 million years," said graduate student Gammodo Miriam Keppler of the Max Planck Institute of Astronomy in Germany. "The exciting fact of our discovery is that here we have an exceptionally strong detection of a young planet, still contained in such a disc."

Scientists already thought that PDS 70 could have a protoplanetary record in 1992, and in fact, they detected the record in 2006. The researchers continued to examine this area, the last time on February 24 of this year. SPHERE blocks the light of the star, allowing researchers to observe the dust disk and the planet – much lower – at different wavelengths. Old and new data show the noticeable presence of a planet that leaves a trace behind it: a space on the disk.

Another badysis estimates that this planet at 1000 degrees Celsius has between 2 and 17 times the mbad of Jupiter, with a radius of about 1.4 to 3.7 times that of Jupiter. It is probably 5.4 million years old and is in orbit around the PDS 70 at about 22 times the distance from the Earth to the Sun. It takes 118 Earth years for this planet to complete an orbit around its star.

The two studies that detail The New Planet appears in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics .

It is important to study these young planets to understand how planets form in a general way. "Spectrum measurement gives us information about how planetary atmospheres are at a very early stage in their lives," said Keppler. "This is very important for calibrating theoretical models that predict the properties of planets as they evolve."

Of course, this investigation only touches the surface; there are many more planets and protoplanetary disks to study before fully understanding the process of planetary formation. New telescopes such as the James Webb space telescope and Atacama's large millimeter / submillimeter array could help illuminate (or, in this case, block light) this mysterious cosmic phenomenon.

[Astronomy and Astrophysics 1, 2]