Astronomers were able to prove for the first time, that a newborn planet is located on a direct image of a gas-dust disk around another star. The discovery was made by using the SPHERE spectropolarimeter installed at the European VLT Telescope in Chile.
The unique results will soon appear in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics. In particular, the scientists were able to reflect the formation of the planet near the dwarf star PDS 70. The best tool currently installed on the ground telescopes for searching the exoplanet is the spectropolarimeter SPHERE - also allowed to obtain a spectrum of the body, indicating the existence of a cloud layer.
The planet is at a distance about of 20 astronomical units (the average annual distance from Earth to the Sun) from the parent star, which is approximately equivalent to the orbit of Uranus. The object belongs to the type of giant planets and has a mass several times more than that of Jupiter.
"Disks around young stars are the birthplace of planets, but only a small amount of observations indicated that there are newborn planets inside them," says Miriam Keppler of the Max Planck Institute of Astronomy in Germany. "The problem is that by this time all such candidate planets could only be artifacts in the disk."
The presence of such a giant planet in the protoplanetary disk has changed it and turned it into a so-called transitional disk. Such an object characterizes by a lower temperature, as well as a "hole" at a distance from the star, which is associated with the influence of the formed planet on the motion of matter. The discovery of a planet in an empty disk area also for the first time proves directly the connection between these phenomena. Scientists call the discovery as an important step towards a complete understanding of the complex and yet fully explained process of planetary evolution, especially of its early phases.