Astronomers capture the first image of a newborn planet



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BERLIN (EFE) – A team of astronomers, led by a group from 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 A star powder

The discovery, published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics and made with the long-range telescope (VLT) of the Southern European Observatory (ESO), has managed to capture the planet in dividing a path through the material that surrounds the star, and from which tend to form this type of stars

to the SPHER instrument E installed in the VLT, one of the most powerful planets search instruments of the moment, which serves to study this type of celestial bodies by means of a technique known as the contrasting image high

This method, with the help of a chronograph – a mask that blocks the blinding light of the central star and can detect planetary objects around – facilitated the capture and measurement of the brightness of the planet, which allowed to better know its atmospheric properties.

The resulting image reflects a bright spot to the right of a dark center of chronograph use, located about 3,000 million kilometers from the central star, an equivalent distance to that between Uranus and the sun.

The analysis also shows that the PDS 70b is a giant planet formed of gas with a mass of a few times that of Jupiter and a surface temperature of about 1000 degrees Celsius, much hotter than anything " After more than a decade of tremendous effort to build this high-tech machine, now SPHERE allows us to pick up what has been planted with the discovery of baby planets! "Said Thomas Henning, director of the Max Planck Institute of Astronomy and Team Leader.

For Miriam Keppler, team leader after the discovery, although the discs of young stars are the birthplaces of the planets, "until now, only a handful of observations have detected traces of planetary babies. "

" We needed to observe a planet in the disc of a young star to truly understand the processes of planetary formation, "comments another author, André Müller. The discovery has already deepened from the initial observations, to obtaining a spectrum of the planet, which led to the conclusion that its atmosphere was turbid With the results obtained and the analysis of the properties astronomers and physicists of the planet, astronomers will be able to advance in the theoretical explanations on the phenomenon of the planetary formation in the space

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