Birth in space: first picture of a baby planet



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Space

Exoplanets First and spectacular photo of the birth of a planet

| Reading time: 2 minutes

  Norbert Lossau

  Photo of the birth of an exoplanet - the small bright circle. Until now, there was only such an "artistic representation"   Photo of the birth of an exoplanet - the small brilliant circle. Until now, there was only such an "artistic representation"

Photo of the birth of an exoplanet – the small bright circle. Until now, there was only one such "artistic representation"

Source: ESO / A. Müller and others

German researchers took a photo of a freshly born planet with a telescope from the European Southern Observatory. They have also managed to make statements about the atmosphere of the planet.

Z For the first time, scientists were able to observe a planet emerging from a disk of gas and dust around a young star. The very large telescope of the European Southern Observatory Eso has taken a surprisingly clear picture of planetary birth.

The star PDS 70, orbiting the planet, was erased when recording with the Sphere instrument. It appears in the image as a black circle, which should not be confused with a black hole.

There are clouds in the atmosphere

Scientists, coordinated by a team from the Max Planck Institute of Astronomy in Heidelberg studied the planet baptized at PDS 70b at different wavelengths of light, thus recording a spectrum of light that it emitted.

From there, they were able to deduce, among other things, that there must be clouds in its atmosphere. Nevertheless, we can exclude that there may be life on this celestial body. The planet PDS 70b is a large gaseous planet slightly less massive than Jupiter in our planetary system.

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The distance from PDS 70b to its central star is d & # 39; 39, about three billion kilometers, about the distance from Uranus corresponds to the sun. The researchers were also able to deduce measured data that temperatures of about 1000 degrees Celsius prevail over the surface of the planet PDS 70b.

The world's largest telescope is under construction in Chile

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In Chile, the first stone was laid for the largest optical telescope in the world. The Atacama desert is ideal as a location, as the sky is particularly clear. The first images will be available in about seven years.

Nevertheless, the photo of the newborn planet is spectacular because it is the first of its kind and because it was taken to the surface of the Earth and not from a space telescope .

Professor Thomas Henning, director of the Max Planck Institute of Astronomy, commented: "After more than a decade of great efforts to build this high-tech machine, Sphere is rewarding us with the discovery of a baby planet.

Understanding the Origin of Planets

This discovery would not have been possible if Sphere did not have an extremely effective way of bleaching light of a star that eclipses in another way, revealing planets and dusty dust in its environment.

It is very important for researchers to observe planets at an early stage of their training to really understand the processes involved in planet formation, which in turn is exciting in terms of how our own planetary system was created.

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