Young planet in formation spotted near a dwarf star

BERLIN: At first, scientists captured a spectacular image of a planet being formed – slicing through cosmic matter around a young dwarf star.

Using the SPHERE instrument on the Very Large Telescope (VLT), one of the most powerful instruments on the planet, astronomers led by a team from the Max Planck Institute of 39, Astronomy in Germany have made the first robust detection of the young planet. , named PDS 70b.

The SPHERE instrument also allowed the team to measure the brightness of the planet at different wavelengths, which allowed to deduce the properties of its atmosphere.

The planet stands out very clearly in new observations, visible as a bright spot to the right of the blackened center of the image.

It is located about three billion kilometers from the central star, which is roughly equivalent to the distance between Uranus and the Sun. The badysis shows that the PDS 70b is a giant gas planet with a mbad a few times higher than that of Jupiter.

The surface of the planet has a temperature of about 1000 degrees Celsius, which makes it much hotter than any planet in our own solar system.

The dark region in the center of the image is due to a coronagraph, a mask that blocks the blinding light of the central star and allows astronomers to detect its much weaker disk and its planetary companion.

Without this mask, the dim light of the planet would be completely overwhelmed by the high brightness of the PDS 70.

"These discs around the young stars are the birthplaces of the planets, but up to here only a handful of observations have detected clues of baby planets," said Miriam Keppler, who led the Team behind the discovery of the 70 PDS still in training. planet.

"The problem is that until now, most of these candidates to the planet could have been features of the disc," Keppler said.

The discovery of the young companion of the PDS 70 is an exciting scientific result that deserves to be deepened.

A second team, involving several of the same astronomers as the discovery team, including Keppler, followed in recent months the first observations to further investigate the nascent planetary companion of PDS 70.

They not only made the spectacularly clear picture of the planet shown here, but were even able to get a spectrum of the planet. The badysis of this spectrum indicates that its atmosphere is cloudy.

The planetary mate of PDS 70 sculpted a transitional disc – a protoplanetary disc with a giant "hole" in the center. These internal gaps have been known for decades and it has been speculated that they have been produced by disk-planet interaction. Now we can see the planet for the first time.

"Keppler's findings give us a new window on the complex and poorly understood early stages of global evolution," said Andre Muller, leader of the second team to investigate the young planet.

"We needed to observe a planet in the disc of a young star to really understand the processes behind the formation of the planet," said Muller.

By determining the atmospheric and physical properties of the planet, astronomers can test theoretical models of the formation of the planet.

This glimpse of the dust-free birth of a planet has only been possible thanks to the awesome technological capabilities of ESO's SPHERE instrument, which studies exoplanets and disks around nearby stars using a technique known as high contrast imaging.
Even by blocking the light of a star with a coronograph, SPHERE still needs to use observation strategies and data processing techniques intelligently designed to filter the signal of planetary companions around bright young stars at multiple lengths wave and eras.