First confirmed image of the newborn planet captured with the ESO VLT

This spectacular image of the SPHERE instrument on ESO's Very Large Telescope is the first sharp image of a planet caught red-handed training around the dwarf star PDS 70 The planet stands out clearly, visible as a bright spot to the right of the center of the image, which is obscured by the coronographic mask used to block the blinding light of the central star. Credit: ESO / A. Müller et al

Astronomers led by a group of the Max Planck Institute of Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany have captured a dramatic glimpse of the planetary formation around the dwarf young star PDS 70. Using the SPHERE instrument on ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT) – one of the most powerful planet-hunting instruments existing – the international team has made the first robust detection of a young planet, named PDS 70b, cutting a path through the material forming the planet surrounding the young star.

The SPHERE instrument also allowed the team to measure the brightness of the planet at different wavelengths, which allowed to deduce the properties of its atmosphere.

The planet is very clearly distinguished in new observations. the blackened center of the image. It is located about three billion kilometers from the central star, which is roughly equivalent to the distance between Uranus and the Sun. The analysis shows that the PDS 70b is a giant gas planet with a mass a few times higher than that of Jupiter. The surface of the planet has a temperature of about 1000 ° C, which makes it much hotter than any planet in our own solar system.

The dark region in the center of the image is due to a coronagraph that blocks the blinding light of the central star and allows astronomers to detect its much weaker disk and its planetary companion. Without this mask, the dim light of the planet would be completely overwhelmed by the high brightness of the PDS 70.

"These discs around the young stars are the birthplaces of the planets, but until now, only a handful of observations have detected clues of baby planets in them, "says Miriam Keppler, who led the team behind the discovery of the planet still in formation of PDS 70." The problem is that up to Now, most of these candidates to the planet could just be on the record. "

The discovery of the young companion of the PDS 70 is an exciting scientific result that deserves to be deepened. A second team, involving several of the same astronomers as the Discovery Team, including Keppler, followed in recent months the first observations to further investigate the nascent planetary companion of the PDS 70. They not only made the Spectacularly clear image of the planet shown here, but were even able to get a spectrum of the planet. The analysis of this spectrum indicates that its atmosphere is cloudy.

The planetary mate of PDS 70 sculpted a transitional disc – a protoplanetary disc with a giant "hole" in the center. These internal gaps have been known for decades and it has been speculated that they have been produced by disk-planet interaction. Now we can see the planet for the first time.

"The results of Keppler give us a new window on the first complex and poorly understood stages of global evolution," says André Müller, head of the second team. . "We needed to observe a planet in the disc of a young star to really understand the processes behind the formation of the planet." By determining the atmospheric and physical properties of the planet, astronomers can test theoretical models of the formation of the planet. The birth of a dust-protected planet has only been possible thanks to the awesome technological capabilities of ESO's SPHERE instrument, which studies exoplanets and disks around nearby stars using a technique known as high contrast imaging. Even by blocking the light of a star with a coronagraph, SPHERE still needs to use observation strategies and intelligent data processing techniques to filter the signal of planetary companions around bright young stars at multiple lengths of time. Wave and eras.

Thomas Henning, director of the Max Planck Institute of Astronomy and leader of the teams, summarizes the scientific adventure: "After more than a decade of tremendous effort to build this high-tech machine, now SPHERE allows us to harvest the harvest with the discovery of baby planets! "