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Credit: ESO / A. Müller, et al The black spot is where the star was hidden, and the planet is just to the right (Usage does not imply endorsement of site contents) |
Astronomers at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany, are claiming to have captured a spectacular snapshot of planetary formation around a young dwarf star. They did this using the SPHERE instrument on the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile. They found evidence of a giant gas planet with a mass a few times that of Jupiter near the orange dwarf star PDS 70, some 370 light-years from Earth.
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To read the entire article, click on "Conclusive evidence that dust rings around some stars grow into planets?"The planetary companion to this star was found within an inner gap of what astronomers have termed a ‘protoplanetary disk’. Protoplanetary disks are believed to form from the leftovers of the molecular cloud that supposedly collapsed to form the star. But in this case, there is a gap between the dust and the star, making it look more like a donut than a disk. The doughnut-hole gap is called a transition disk because it is considered to be in transition from a formerly solid disk to a stellar planetary system, and large gaps have presumably begun to form.
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