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SANTIAGO, Chile.- 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 3,000 million kilometers (about the same distance between Uranus and the Sun), which, according to scientists, corroborates the theory that the gaseous planets like Jupiter
According to El Mundo's information, 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 The Authors of the discovery are detailed this week in two articles published in Astronomy & Astrophysics. That is to say that the PDS 70b is still very close to where it was born and continues to accumulate matter
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there is still matter in the circle surrounding the star, the planet could continue to collect gas and grow, it is difficult to determine how much, although it is reasonable to think that she has already practically reached her final mass "says Miriam Keppler, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute in Germany and lead author of the l & # 39; study.
The detection of this very young planet was possible thanks to the powerful SPHERE instrument installed in the Very Large Telescope (VLT) that the European Southern 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 coronagraph, the device used to block the intense light that comes from the star. As Keppler detailed, the PDS 70 star has between five and six million years, which gives them the idea of the maximum age of the planet
"We saw 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 can only have a few million years." [19659002] According to 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
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