Spectacular image from space shows the formation of a young planet

 

An illustration of the newly forming planet PDS 70b.© Y. Zhou / UT Austin / NASA, ESA, STScI and J. Olmsted

How do planets and planetary systems arise? A spectacular image from space could now shed light on the darkness. It is the youngest exoplanet pictured to date.

Texas - These are special images from space: Images from the “Very Large Telescope” of “ESO” and the “Hubble” space telescope show the most recent giant planets outside of our solar system - discovered and photographed by humans. It's about the exoplanet PDS 70b, which orbits the star PDS70 and is apparently still growing. The recordings are so spectacular because they could provide information about how the giant planet Jupiter, for example, was formed billions of years ago in our solar system.

“We don't know much about the formation of giant planets. We now have the opportunity for the first time to be witness to how matter becomes a planet. Our results open up a new research approach ", Brendan Bower from the University of Texas is quoted by" NASA ".

Images from space: Young planet could provide information on the formation of planets

However, the discovery of the planet PDS 70b goes back to the 1990s. At that time, an image of a dwarf star 370 light years from Earth first met with particular interest from NASA and ESA. The scientists also discovered a protoplanetary disk through the image. What sounds so mysterious is a disk of gas and dust around a star that is in the making. How exactly a planetary system can form from this is one of the secrets of our universe and has not yet been fully clarified.

In 2018 the planet PDS 70b was discovered near the star. This very young giant planet, which consists mainly of gas, is said to have a mass many times greater than that of Jupiter. The researchers were able to infer this from the recordings. PDS 70b is 22 times as far from its star as the earth is from the sun, announced the Max Planck Institute in Heidelberg. In addition, PDS 70b needed 227.5 years to orbit its star, said NASA in turn.

Researchers are astonished by spectacular images of the exoplanet PDS 70b

“This system is so exciting because we can be the stuff of the creation of a planet. It's the youngest planet Hubble has ever photographed directly, ”says Yifan Zhou of the University of Texas. At its young age of five million years, the planet was still collecting matter and forming mass.

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New images of "Hubble" enabled the astrophysicists to find new details inside to find out how the planet was formed. Radiations can be analyzed using the recordings. These allow estimates of how much matter there is in the vicinity of the star or exoplanet. From this it can in turn be deduced how much the exoplanet is growing or whether moons are formed. "Hubble's recordings allow us to estimate how quickly the planet is gaining mass," says Zhou.

The latest evaluations of these recordings were published by the research team in the April issue of "The Astronomical Journal". Another planet, called PDS 70c, was also discovered in the fascinating planetary system in 2019. "Nasa" was able to reproduce the two exoplanets and the planetary system in an animation . Although around 4,000 exoplanets have already been registered, only 15 could be photographed directly through a telescope. (Delia Friess) Only recently, a NASA image of an exoplanet gave indications of a second atmosphere. * fr.de is an offer from IPPEN.MEDIA .