A giant telescope captures the first image of a newborn planet

With the help of one of the most powerful ground-based telescopes, an international team of astronomers took a spectacular picture of a nascent planet emerging from the gas disk and debris surrounding his host. star

The first image of its kind – included in new research published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics – shows an extraterrestrial world known as PDS 70b that revolves around a dwarf star at 370 light-years of the earth. the Centaurus constellation.

This is a photo of baby of all kinds, 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 "This confirms our image of the formation of the planet, namely that the planets, while accumulating materials from their environment, are digging a hole in the disc ", Miriam Keppler, astronomer at the Max Planck Institute for 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."

<img src = "https://media2.s-nbcnews.com/j/newscms/2018_27/2484776/180702-centaurus-se-545p_287362178fc95643595330487b6366d3.fit-760w.jpg" alt = "Image: A map of the southern constellation Centaurus and most stars visible to the naked eye 19659009] A map of the southern constellation Centaurus and most stars visible to the naked eye on a clear dark night. Dwarf star PDS 70 is marked with a red circle ESO / IAU and Sky telescope amd

The picture shows PDS 70b as a bright yellowish spot near his host star, PDS 70, which is obscured by a black disc known as a coronagraph that astronomers use to prevent the light of a star from flushing a lot of paler planets.In reality, the PDS 70b is about 3 billions of kilometers from the PDS 70, or roughly at the distance of Uranus to the sun

Other pictures have my The planetary features in the discs around their host stars, but it was still difficult to say with certainty that the features represented real planets.

"This is the first time we see a planet drowned in a gas record around a young star," Heather Knutson, a global science professor at Caltech in Pasadena, Calif., Said 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 the PDS 70, which is about 5,000 times brighter than the 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, said in an email."

"This is a very interesting and interesting result. very convincing. Bruce Macintosh, a physicist at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, told the journal Science

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