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An international team of astronomers has managed to capture some extraordinarily rare images of planetary systems that are born hundreds of light years away.
While we’ve seen “protoplanetary disk” images before, we’ve never seen the process captured in such detail.
“In [earlier] Images, the regions near the star, where rocky planets form, are covered by just a few pixels, “lead author Jacques Kluska of KU Leuven in Belgium said in a statement.
The images show the inner areas around young stars where planets begin to take shape, accumulating dust and gas matter. Dust grains accumulate on larger rocks, some of which eventually grow on entire rocky planets.
“We needed to visualize these details in order to identify patterns that could betray the formation of planets and characterize the properties of the disks,” said Kluska.
The researchers had to use a relatively new imaging technique called infrared interferometry at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Chile to capture the images.
The technique does not produce an image directly. Using mathematical models, not unlike how the first images of a black hole were created, the team was able to separate the disks from the light emitted by the star itself.
The level of detail of the new images is astonishing.
“Distinguishing scale details of the orbits of rocky planets like Earth or Jupiter (as you can see from the images), 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, “said Jean-Philippe Berger, principal investigator at the University Grenoble-Alpes, France, in the statement.
So what did you end up seeing in the new images? The brighter and darker points of light could be a sign that “there could be instabilities in the disk that can lead to vortices where the disk accumulates grains of space dust that can grow and evolve on a planet,” according to Kluska.
READ MORE: The earlier times of a solar system[[[[The atlantic]
More about planetary formation: THE STAR DISPLACES THE OWN PLANETS IN WEARED BODIES, THE DEVOURS REMAIN
