Extraordinary Images Show New Planet Being Born 440 Light-Years Away
Astronomers have captured remarkable images that may show, for the first time, a distant new planet being born.
The images, taken using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), show the young planet shaping spirals of dust and gas in the disc around its star.
Researchers estimate the forming planet is about twice the size of Jupiter and sits at a similar distance from its star as Neptune does from the Sun. This planet orbits a star called HD 135344B, which is located about 440 light-years away from Earth.
“We will never witness the formation of Earth, but here, around a young star 440 light-years away, we may be watching a planet come into existence in real time,” says Francesco Maio, a doctoral researcher at the University of Florence, Italy, and lead author of this study, published on Monday in Astronomy & Astrophysics.
Planets form from spinning discs of hot gas and dust called protoplanetary discs, which surround very young stars. As planets develop, they clear paths along their orbits, creating rings, gaps, and spiral shapes in the dust. While astronomers have seen these patterns before, this is the first time they’ve observed and captured a planet actively shaping them.
What The Images Show
The image on the left, taken by European Southern Observatory’s VLT, may show a planet forming around the young star HD 135344B. The star is surrounded by a disc of dust and gas with clear spiral arms. Scientists believe that these spirals are formed by young planets — and this possible planet is located right at the base of one of the arms, exactly where expected.
This detailed image was captured using the VLT’s newest infrared instrument, the Enhanced Resolution Imager and Spectrograph (ERIS). The black circle in the center is a coronagraph that blocks the star’s bright light, allowing fainter objects nearby to be seen. A white circle marks where the potential planet is located.
The image on the right combines earlier observations from the SPHERE instrument at the VLT (shown in red) and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, or ALMA (shown in orange and blue). Previous studies of HD 135344B, including these, didn’t find any signs of a companion — but the new ERIS image may have finally revealed the object shaping the star’s spiral disc.
“What makes this detection potentially a turning point is that, unlike many previous observations, we are able to directly detect the signal of the protoplanet, which is still highly embedded in the disc,” says Maio, who is based at the Arcetri Astrophysical Observatory, a center of Italy’s National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF). “This gives us a much higher level of confidence in the planet’s existence, as we’re observing the planet’s own light.”
Image credits: Header photo by ESO/F. Maio et al./T. Stolker et al./ ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)/N. van der Marel et al.
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