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An international team of scientists was able to capture images of planet-forming disks hundreds of light-years from Earth. The photos, which are an achievement in themselves, shed new light on how planetary systems are born.
Those protoplanetary clouds of dust and gas, shaped like vinyl music records, appear around young stars, and astronomers believe that the matter found in them eventually turns into planets.
Scientists previously struggled to properly capture planet-forming disks, as even the images from the largest telescopes were not detailed enough. A new study, published in Astronomy and Astrophysics on Thursday, solved this problem with completely different observation techniques.
Lead author Jacques Kluska of KU Leuven in Belgium and his colleagues, who were working on the project at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Chile, have relied on the method called infrared interferometry.
They used ESO’s PIONIER instrument to combine the light collected by four telescopes to obtain the images from the discs. That was not the end of his work, as starlight hampered the level of detail in the photos, so the missing pieces had to be recovered through mathematical reconstruction.
“I am delighted that we now have fifteen of these images for the first time” Kluska said. The photos show the inner edges of planet-forming discs where rocky planets like Earth are believed to form.
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“Distinguishing scale details from the orbits of rocky planets like Earth or Jupiter, a fraction of the Earth-Sun distance, is equivalent to being able to see a human on the Moon, or distinguish a hair at a distance of 10 km,” noted Jean-Philippe Berger from the Grenoble-Alpes University in France, who was in charge of working with the PIONIER instrument.
The images received by the team have revealed “Brighter or less bright” stains on the discs, which could be “Instabilities” that would eventually result in planet formation. Kluska and his team plan to do additional research to find out what causes those processes, while also trying to get even more detailed images of protoplanetary clouds.
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