Scientists have observed a planet forming for the first time ever

The star is located 450 light-years away from Earth, but despite the distance researchers were still able to capture the stunning images of a planet in the process of formation.

When a new star forms, it creates a disc like object that is full of dust and gas, basically what is needed to form a planet. The group’s paper, which has been published in Nature, combines data from separate studies conducted by two lead authors: University of Arizona graduate student Stephanie Sallum and her former schoolmate Kate Follette, who’s now doing postdoctoral research at Stanford University. “There have always been alternative explanations, but in this case we’ve taken a direct picture, and it’s hard to dispute that.” .

To make an already very impressive find even more impressive, of the 2,000 or so known exoplanets in the universe, only 10 have ever been imaged – and they were all fully formed.

“This discovery has far-reaching implications for our understanding of the planet-formation process and of the properties of young planets”, he stated.

“It’s like a big doughnut”, said Follette.

Sallum and co-authors observed LkCa 15b and two other planets in the system using the 8.4-m Large Binocular Telescope on Mount Graham in Arizona and the UA’s Magellan Telescope in Chile.

“When you look through the Earth’s atmosphere, what you’re seeing is cold and hot air mixing in a turbulent way that makes stars shimmer”, said team member Professor Close of the University of Arizona. As hydrogen gas falls from the disc onto the core of the protoplanet, it heats up and glows like a fluorescent light bulb, emitting a characteristic wavelength of visible light called “Hydrogen-alpha”, or H-alpha.

The team confirmed the existence of LkCA 15b, imaging it directly in hydrogen-alpha photons, a type of light that’s emitted when superheated material accretes onto a newly forming world. Gravity slowly gathered small dusts to form rocks, and these rocks collided and formed bigger objects.

Simply looking at the the odds, “it’s unlikely that you’ll come across a planet when it’s still forming”, she says.

While we don’t have real life images just yet, the illustrations that you are about to see are something really special.

“We’re trying to see very faint planets buried in the glare of the star”. Now that this method has been tested and successfully produced an image of a planet early on in its formation, it is sure to be used to examine other young stars that might host growing protoplanets in their system. But the scientists couldn’t see everything – and they think there may be more planets in the gap of the protoplanetary disk.

Thus, scientists have no forming planets to observe, and are left with comparing their models for how the birth of planets takes place with the end results, like entirely mature rocky worlds and gas giants. It was discovered in 2011 by astronomers Adam Kraus and Michael Ireland using the Keck II telescope.