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This is the first confirmed image of a baby planet that is still trapped in the dust disk around a very young star.
On the beautiful picture above you can see the dust disk around the very young star PDS 70. the bright spot next to the dark heart (see frame) of the photo. This is the baby planet PDS 70b, unveiled by SPHERE, an instrument on the ESO's Very Large Telescope. It shows how the planet – about 3 billion kilometers from the star – blows its way through the dust disk that surrounds the PDS 70.
At the heart of the photo, we see a black spot. This place is caused by a coronograph. This is a mask that stops the light of the star. This allows the researchers to observe the disk and the planet – whose light would otherwise be canceled by the light of the PDS 70.
The PDS 70b was born from this dust disk. "These discs around the young stars are the nurseries of the planets, but until now, only a handful of observations have found traces of small planets," says researcher Miriam Keppler. "The problem is that most of the planetary candidates that have been registered so far could simply be structures in the disk itself." In the case of PDS 70b, however, there is no doubt: it is a planet. This is the first clear detection of a young planet that is still in the dust disk.
The newborn planet. Image: ESO / A. Müller and others
Giant Giant
Research has shown that it is a huge gaseous planet that is several times heavier than Jupiter. With a surface temperature of about 1000 degrees Celsius, the planet is much hotter than the planets of our solar system.
Spectrum
During follow-up observations, the researchers managed to get the baby planet even more in detail. explain. This spectrum betrays that the atmosphere of PDS 70b is cloud-rich.
New perspective on baby planets
Researchers are excited about the research. "Keppler's results give us a new window on the complex and misunderstood initial stages of planet formation," says researcher André Müller. "We had to observe a planet in the disc of a young star to really understand the processes behind the formation of the planet."
Watching such baby planets is enormously complicated by the bright light of the stars around which they turn. Even though this light is filtered, intelligent perception strategies and understanding processing techniques are still needed to observe the weak signal of the baby planet. SPHERE has all this in the house. "After more than a decade of work on the construction of this advanced machine, SPHERE can now leverage our tremendous efforts and discover baby planets!", According to researcher Thomas Henning.
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