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A newborn planet has just been photographed by a telescope located in Chile. PDS 70b, as it was baptized, is a gaseous giant, bigger than Jupiter. Orbiting the dwarf star called PDS 70, which is separated by 3 billion kilometers (about the same distance between Uranus and the Sun), which, according to scientists, corroborates the theory that the gaseous planets like Jupiter forms at great distance from his star. For the first time, astronomers were able to clearly observe the process of planet formation in the disk of gas and dust that surrounds the star, according to detailed authors of the discovery in two articles published in Astronomy & Astrophysics.
A Young Planet
In other words, the PDS 70b is still very close to the place where he was born and continues to accumulate material. "Because there is still material in the circle surrounding the star, the planet could continue to collect gas and growing.It is difficult to determine how much, although it is reasonable to think it's almost reached its final mass, "says Miriam Keppler, researcher at the Max Planck Institute in Germany and lead author of the study.
Detecting this very young planet was possible thanks to the powerful SPHERE instrument installed in the Very Large Telescope (VLT) that the Southern European Observatory (ESO) has in Chile.
In the image captured by the telescope , you can see the star and the planet (this is the luminous sphere located to the right of the center) .The black circle in the middle of the photograph is the trace left by the coronograph, the device used to block the intense light that comes from the star.
Brightness, Atmos According to detailed Keppler, the star PDS 70 has between five and six million years, which gives them an idea of the maximum age of the planet. "We have witnessed a snapshot of the planetary system but we still do not know exactly when the planet began to form.According to our theoretical models, it is possible that it is only a few million years old years. "According to the calculations of the Gaia space probe, which carries out a census of the Milky Way, the star PDS 70 is at a distance of 370 light-years.A thousand degrees at its surface. astronomers were able to measure the brightness of the planet at different wavelengths, which allowed them to deduce certain properties of its atmosphere and determine, for example, that it seems to have clouds. they estimate that the temperatures on the PDS 70b surface are around 1000ºC, making it a much hotter world than any planet in the solar system.
Nearly 4 thousand planets
According to the scientist , the material disks aut our young stars are the birthplaces of planets "but until now only a handful of observations had detected clues of newborn worlds in them." "These results open a new window on the complex and little understood early stages of planetary evolution. We needed to observe a planet in his stellar disk to really understand the processes behind planetary formation, "said Andre Müller, lead author of the second study, in a statement, and that is, well that there are about 3,800 planets discovered outside the solar system, with characteristics and distances to their very diverse stars, the observation worlds in formation had been very problematic.Is it possible to detect a world like the Earth in formation? "With the current generation of instruments, it is not possible to capture a direct image of planets with a mass like that of the Earth. The problem is that the less we have mass, the more we see it, "said Keppler, who said that" currently, we can directly detect planets with a mass similar to Jupiter. "
Source: El Mundo – Science
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