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When she saw pictures of the young planet PDS 70B, "It seemed so clear," says Miriam Keppler, who led a team in the discovery.
ESO / A. Muller et al.
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ESO / A. Muller et al.
When she saw pictures of the young planet PDS 70B, "It seemed so clear," says Miriam Keppler, who led a team in the discovery.
ESO / A. Muller et al.
An international team of scientists discovered a young planet – aged only 5 or 6 million years – forging its own path through space and probably developing along the way.
Scientists have captured a photograph that they believe is the very first direct image of the birth of a planet that is still forming around a star.
It is a major discovery for those of us on Earth, a planet from 4.5 to 19459025 billion years old.
The newly discovered planet may be young, but it is huge: several times the size of Jupiter, which could contain 1,300 terrestrial planets inside.
The images provide useful information on the formation of planets, including those of our own solar system.
A team of about 120 scientists worked on research, published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics. "It's a long and cautious process," to characterize a young planet, says Andre Muller, who worked at the Max Planck Institute of Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany. "We worked for at least a year on it daily."
The name of the planet? PDS 70 b. This is based on the name of the orbit star, PDS 70.
But the research team has not yet given a nickname to the new planet.
The photos released on Monday were taken with the aptly named Very Large Telescope – a Chile-based facility that can combine images of four of the world's most advanced telescopes.
Scientists theorized that planets form and grow in protoplanetary disks – collections of gas and dust surrounding a young star. This photo captured this process for the first time.
"We now have evidence that planetary objects [carve] are a hole in the disc," says Muller. "It's a very lucky case."
And the new planet revolved around the star, albeit slowly. PDS 70b completes orbit once every 120 terrestrial years.
Scientists know that young planets are forming in our Milky Way, and they have already heard of them, says Miriam Keppler, who was leading a team on the project at the Max Planck Institute. But they never documented a planet as it was formed.
"It was breathtaking," says Keppler. "He looked so clear."
This discovery confirms the theoretical models of planet formation and will help scientists better understand the birth of planets.
And these new discoveries do not only concern very distant planets.
"It is important to understand how the planets of our own solar system were formed," says Keppler.
As Muller puts it: "It's a step forward to understand where we come from."
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