Astronomers believe that they have the first images of the formation of a planet.
The image above shows a snapshot of the nascent planet traveling around the dust and gas of the young star, known as PDS70, presumably about 370 light years from Earth.
The black center shown in the picture is a filter so that the other features are visible. Captured by the Sphere instrument of the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope, the planet has a greater mass than Jupiter. It’s as far from its star as Uranus is to the sun. Experts believe that it has a cloudy atmosphere and a surface temperature of 1000C.
“These discs around young stars are the birthplaces of planets, but so far only a handful of observations have detected hints of baby planets in them,” said Miriam Keppler of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany. But there hasn’t been any conclusive evidence.
“The problem is that until now, most of these planet candidates could just have been features in the disc,” she said. “The advantage of our detection is that we have detected [the new planet] with several different observing instruments, different filter bands and different years,” she added.
Now astronomers plan to continue observing to explore how the planet develops.
