Astronomers captured the first direct evidence of an exoplanet born

At this point we have spotted several thousand exoplanets – there is nothing very exciting about finding a distant star with multiple worlds in orbit around. But today, scientists announce that they have seen an exoplanet being formed.

The PDS 70 star dust disc was detected by the SPHERE and NAOS-CONICA instruments of the Very Large Telescope and Gemini near-infrared coronagraphic imager, all located in Chile. But after re-analyzing the dust data and making further observations with SPHERE, the scientists found what they were looking for: solid evidence of a spot in the dust.

"The planets are born in circumstellar discs, these discs are made of gas and dust and surround young stars up to a lifetime of about 10 million years," he said. told Gizmodo, Miriam Keppler, graduate student of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany. "The exciting fact of our discovery is that here we have an unusually robust detection of a young planet [19659006] still integrated in such a disc. "

Scientists thought that the PDS 70 could have such a protoplanetary disk as in 1992, and actually spotted the disc in 2006. The researchers continued to examine this region, most recently the February 24th of this year.SPHERE blocks the starlight, allowing researchers to observe the dust disk and the planet at several wavelengths.The old and new data show the distinct presence of a planet, leaving behind a trace – a hole in the disc.

Another analysis estimated that the planet of nearly 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit is between two and 17 times Jupiter, with a radius of 1.4 to 3.7 times that of Jupiter. It is probably 5.4 million years old and is in orbit around the PDS 70 at about 22 times the distance between the Earth and the Sun. It takes 118 Earth years for this planet to make a complete orbit around its star.

The two articles detailing the new planet appear in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.

It is important to study these planets in order to understand how planets form more generally. "Spectrum measurement gives us insight into how planetary atmospheres occur at a very early stage of life," said Keppler. "This is very important for calibrating theoretical models that predict the properties of planets as they evolve."

Of course, this research only touches the surface; there are many more planets and protoplanetary disks to study before we can ever fully understand the process of planetary formation. New telescopes such as the James Webb Space Telescope and Atacama's large millimeter / millimeter network could potentially help illuminate the light (or, in this case, block the light) on this mysterious cosmic phenomenon.

[Astronomy and Astrophysics 1, 2]