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With the help of one of Earth's most powerful telescopes, an international team of astronomers took a spectacular picture of a newborn planet emerging from the disc of gas and debris surrounding its host star
The first-of-its-kind image – included in new research to appear in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics – shows an extraterrestrial world known as PDS 70b orbiting around A dwarf star at 370 light-years from Earth in the Centaur constellation
tris, but PDS 70b is not particularly cute or cuddly. It's a gaseous giant more massive than Jupiter and, with a surface temperature of about 1000 degrees Celsius (about 1800 degrees Fahrenheit), it's hotter than any planet in our system. solar.
And if the image itself is unique, it is "It confirms our image of the formation of the planet, namely that the planets, while accumulating materials from their environment, dig a hole in the disc ", Miriam Keppler, astronomer at the Max Planck Institute of Astronomy. in Heidelberg, Germany, and the leader of the team, told NBC News MACH in an e-mail. "By discovering how the formation of the planet unfolds around other stars, we also learn the history of our own solar system."
The picture shows PDS 70b as a bright yellowish stain near its host star, PDS 70, which is obscured by a black disk known as a coronagraph that astronomers use to prevent light Long live a star to sweep a lot of paler planets. In fact, the PDS 70b is about 3 billion kilometers from the PDS 70, or roughly at the distance from Uranus to the sun
Other images have shown planetary features in the discs around of their host stars, but it was It is still difficult to say with certainty that the features represented real planets.
"This is the first time we see a planet embedded in a gas record around a young star," Heather Knutson, a global science professor at Caltech in Pasadena, Calif., Said to MACH in an email. "Gaseous giant planets like this form on a time scale of several million years, but they are hidden for most of this period due to the presence of the gas disk."
The image was captured by SPHERE. Hunting instrument attached to the Very Large Telescope of the European Southern Observatory, in the Atacama Desert, Chile. Six observations of one to two hours were made of the planet and its host star between 2012 and 2018, Keppler said in the email. Algorithms were then used to suppress the bright light of PDS 70, which is about 5,000 times brighter than PDS 70b and would otherwise have flooded the light of the planet
"The technique used by scientists is ingenious, drawing the weak image "Jay Pasachoff, a Williams College astronomer who was not involved in the new research, told MACH in an email
" This is a very interesting and interesting result. Bruce Macintosh, physicist at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, told Science that
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