Making of a Planet

 

An international team of astronomers have spotted what they believe is a formation of a new planet in another solar system in the our Milky Way galaxy.

 

Dr. Quanz and colleagues had pointed a telescope located in Chile's Atacama Desert towards a young star, HD 100546. This star is about 2.5-times the size of our sun and its comparatively very new, so it is being studied by the scientists to understand the formation of solar systems. Based on their observations by a high-resolution infrared camera linked to the telescope, they observed that the disk of materials around the star showed certain asymmetries. "It's a good indication that something might be hiding or forming in the disk," said Dr. Quanz.

 

The Wall Street Journal quoted that, "The infrared imagery revealed a little bright blob in the disk, suggesting an entity emitting radiation. When the picture of the blob was laid over an image of the asymmetry, they coincided perfectly. This suggests that the blob was an object embedded in the material around the star, suggesting a nascent planet."

 

This composite image shows a view from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope (left) and from the NACO system on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (right) of the gas and dust around the young star HD 100546. Image released Feb 28, 2013. (ESO/NASA/ESA/Ardila et al.)

 

The star HD 100546, which lies 335 light-years from Earth, was already thought to host another giant planet that orbits it about six times farther out than the Earth is from the Sun. The new potential planet or protoplanet lies even farther, about 10 times the distance of its sibling, at roughly 70 times the stretch between the Earth and the Sun. This distance is not much in cosmic terms as Milky Way is itself 100,000 light years away. The protoplanet has a mass that appears to be at least the size of Jupiter, and perhaps two to three times its size.

 

The protoplanet would take tens of thousands of years to grow up but if it holds up, the latest finding would be one of the first direct observations of the very early stages of a planet's birth. Dr. Quanz said, "If our discovery is indeed a forming planet, then for the first time scientists will be able to study the planet formation process and the interaction of a forming planet and its natal environment empirically at a very early stage."