This is a beautiful baby exoplanet! Historical Photo is the first view of the extraterrestrial world being born

An amazing photo, the first of its kind, shows a huge new extraterrestrial world taking shape in the disk of gas and dust surrounding a young star.

The image is the first confirmed direct observation of such a young "These discs around the young stars are the birthplaces of the planets, but so far, only a few observations have detected Baby Planets ", Miriam Keppler, Discovery Manager of the Max Planck Institute. for astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany, said in a statement. "The problem is that, until now, most of these candidate planets might just have been features in the disc." [Gallery: The Strangest Alien Planets]

Keppler and his colleagues analyzed new archival observations of a young dwarf star called PDS 70, which is about 5.4 million years old and is 370 light years from the Earth. These data were collected by two instruments on the Very Large Telescope (VLT) of the European Southern Observatory and an instrument at the Gemini Observatory of Hawaii.

Observations revealed the presence of a gaseous newborn gut in the surrounding protoplanetary disk. And the team was able to photograph the extraterrestrial world, known as PDS 70b, using one of two VLT instruments, which is called SPHERE (Spectro-Polarimetric High-Contrast Exoplanet Research).

SPHERE has a coronagraph, which blocks the blinding light of a star, allowing to solve the planets in orbit. (The Gemini instrument, the near-infrared coronagraphic imager, has one as well.)

The researchers' analyzes suggest that the PDS 70b is two to three times larger than Jupiter and is about 3 billions of kilometers from its star – about as far as Uranus is from the sun.

PDS 70b is much hotter than any planet in our solar system, recording a sizzling 1800 degrees Fahrenheit (1000 degrees Celsius), the researchers determined. This high temperature may seem strange considering the planet's significant distance from its star, but it is in line with that of other newborn gas giants, team members said. ;study. (Extremely young planets retain a lot of heat left by their formation.)

Researchers report the discovery of PDS 70b and its measured and inferred characteristics in a pair of new studies, which were published online today. (July 2) in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics. (You can read them here and here.) (The research teams are not identical for both studies, but there is considerable overlap. For example, Keppler is the lead author of the discovery paper and the second author of the companion study.)

"Keppler's findings give us a new window on the complex and poorly understood early stages of global evolution," said Andre Müller, lead author of the second study, in the same press release.

"We needed to observe a planet in the disc of a young star to really understand the processes of planet formation," adds Müller, also based at the Max Planck Institute for l & # 39; astronomy.

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