Astronomers capture the first birth of a planet



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One of the difficulties of studying the formation of stars and planets has always been the difficulty of confirming our assumptions. As our understanding of the universe has broadened, our own theories have often been revised. We now know, based on the results of investigations like that of the Kepler telescope, that the so-called "hot Jupiters" – gas giants orbiting very close to their host stars – are quite common, while our own system Solar seems rather unusual in the composition, in the location and distance between its planets, and even in the types of orbits that these planets follow around the star.

It is possible, of course, that the pendulum has tipped in the opposite direction, and that our solar system It seems only wrong because the types of planets that we can see around other stars tend to produce in systems very different from ours. But with more than 3,500 exoplanets checked, you would expect to see at least a few who looked like us. Until here, not much luck.

But despite the differences between our own solar system and the rest of the solar systems that we can see, it seems that our theories of planetary formation are on the right track, thanks to the new images captured in the planetary formation process around the world. Another star for the first time

The image above shows the star PDS 70, 370 light-years from Earth, but the star was blocked by a filter to observe the cloud of gas around the star. Astronomers working on the very large European telescope in Chile imagined the PDS 70 because they had observed a hole in its protoplanetary disk, which usually implies an object large enough to attract the material on itself.

This yellow-orange blur right-side of the picture hand

Do not be fooled by the relative size of the picture – PDS 70b is a gaseous giant several times the mass of Jupiter and takes about 120 years to make a single orbit around its sun. This puts him between Uranus (84 years) and Neptune (~ 165 years) compared to the planets of the Earth. Its distance of 22 AU from its house star also places it between these two planets; Uranus is 18-20 AU from the Sun, while Neptune is ~ 30 AU. With an estimated temperature of 1200K and a dark red hue, it is believed that the planet still sucks dust belt material around the planet.

  HL Tau, protoplanetary disk, seen by ALMA

HL Tau, disk protoplanetary, seen by ALMA

Combine this discovery with the first discovery of a star system in formation, HL Tau in 2014, and this means that we now have confirmation that our theories of how stars and planets fuse gas and dust clouds are usually accurate. Obviously, there is still room for a lot of refinement, especially given the uniqueness of our own solar system and the different models that have been proposed to explain it. There are, of course, many things that we still do not understand, especially if Jupiter has already made a quiet trip through the solar system before being overthrown by gravitational interactions with other gaseous and glacial giants [19659011]. the stars we find in the earlier stages of training, the greater the chances that we are spying out scenarios that relate more directly to our own solar system – throwing clues to our own history in the process

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