This picture of a newborn planet is about to tip your world

The universe is vast and we are constantly developing new ways to look at it more closely. When a real observation finally arrives, it's an exciting time – and one of those observations has just been confirmed. Astronomers have captured for the first time a picture of a whole new planet being formed, which reinforces the hypothesis about planet formation and raises further questions about the peculiarities of this process .

The Guardian reported on Monday that scientists from the Southern European Observatory had obtained the image using their Very Large Telescope, which they describe as the only one. one of the most powerful exoplanet hunting tools in the world. While the image looks blurry for untrained eyes, it actually shows a bright spot – the newborn planet – moving across the flat, dull dish of gas and dust that has gathered around the body. Star, PDS70.

"These discs around the young stars are the birthplaces of the planets, but up to here only a handful of observations have detected clues of baby planets," said Miriam Keppler, chief of the 39 team behind the impressive discovery, in a statement. ESO. "The problem is that so far, most of these candidates to the planet might just have been features of the disc."

ESO

According to CNN, being able to actually capture an image of the new planet for the first time was a real breakthrough that will now allow astronomers to advance much faster by learning how planets form. "Keppler's findings give us a new window on the complex and poorly understood early stages of global evolution," said Andre Müller, the leader of another team investigating the young planet, in the release. from ESO. "We needed to observe a planet in the disc of a young star to really understand the processes behind the formation of the planet."

According to the ESO statement, they used SPHERE, a specific element of the Very Large Telescope. to these clouds of dust and gas around the stars, where the exoplanets are formed.

"After more than a decade of tremendous effort to build this high-tech machine, now SPHERE allows us to reap the harvest with the discovery of baby planets!" said Thomas Henning, director of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy and the leader of both teams, in the statement from the ESO. Beyond the mere detection of the planet still in training, which they called PDS 70b, SPHERE was also able to learn a few things about it.

According to USA Today this analysis revealed that the planet is sometimes as large as Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system. It is nearly two billion miles from its host star, which is about as far away as Uranus is from the Sun. While the newborn planet is a gaseous giant, like Jupiter or Uranus, it has a much higher surface temperature than any other planet in our neighborhood. According to USA Today its temperature is about 1832 degrees Fahrenheit – just over double the surface temperature of Venus, which is the hottest planet in our solar system.

The teams that study them believe that the planet and the star are about 370 light-years from Earth, which means that the planet's development point appeared about 370 years ago – this is not a wink of the eye. l & # 39; universe. According to the Guardian the star itself dates only five or six million years, so the planet is probably a little younger. In comparison, our Sun is 4.6 billion years old, according to NASA, the age of the Earth being estimated at about 4.5 billion years. However, there is still much to learn from these two objects, and scientists will observe the planet as it slowly makes its 120-year-old orbit around its planet, according to the Guardian . Over the years, this will teach us more and more about what happened 4.5 billion years ago.