Many Worlds

Tag: ESO

A Young Planet Found That May Well Be Making Moons

July 27, 2021 / / 0 Comments

An image made by the Very Large Telescope in Chile shows a forming planet, the bright spot at right. The overpowering light of the host star is blocked out by a coronagraph inside the telescope. (ESO/A. Müller et al.)

Astronomers have many theories about how planets are formed within the gas, dust, pebbles and gradually rocks of the circumstellar disks that encircle a star after it has been born.  While the general outlines of this remarkable process are pretty well established, many questions large and small remain unanswered.

One is how and when exomoons are formed around these planets, with the assumption that the process that forms planets must also give birth moons.  But the potential moons have been far too small for the current generation of space and ground telescopes to identify.

Now astronomers have detected something almost as significant:  a circumplanetary disk surrounding a young planet that appears to be in the process of making moons.  The moon itself has not been detected, but a forming planet has been found with a ring of dust and gas that surrounds it.  And within that circumplanetary disk, astronomers infer, a moon is possibly being formed.

“Our work presents a clear detection of a disk in which satellites could be forming,” said Dr. Myriam Benisty, an astronomer at the University of Grenoble and the University of Chile.

“The new … observations were obtained at such exquisite resolution that we could clearly identify that the disk is associated with {the exoplanet} and we are able to constrain its size for the first time,” she said in a release.

While the first detection of the planet was made via the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile, the more granular observation of the forming planet and its moon-forming disk was made with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), also in Chile.

This ALMA image shows the young PDS 70 planetary system. The system features a star at its center and at least two planets orbiting it, PDS 70b (not visible in the image) and PDS 70c, surrounded by a circumplanetary disk (the dot to the right of the star). Image credit: ALMA / ESO / NAOJ / NRAO / Benisty et al.)

The finding, published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, came via direct imaging — in effect through extremely high power photography rather through the indirect methods much more common in exoplanet astronomy.… Read more

Barnard’s Star, The "Great White Whale" of Planet Hunting, Has Surrendered Its Secret

November 14, 2018 / / 0 Comments

Barnard’s Star is the closest single star to our sun, and the most fast moving. It has long been attractive to planet hunters because it is so close and so bright, especially in the infared section of the spectrum. But until now, the exoplanets of this “great white whale” have avoided detection.

 

Astronomers have found that Barnard’s star — a very close, fast-moving, and long studied red dwarf — has a super-Earth sized planet orbiting just beyond its habitable zone.

The discovery relied on data collected over many years using the tried-and-true radial velocity method, which searches for wobbles in the movement of the host star.

But this detection was something big for radial velocity astronomers because Barnard-b was among the smallest planet ever found using the technique, and it was the furthest out from its host star as well — orbiting its star every 233 days.

For more than a century, astronomers have studied Barnard’s star as the most likely place to find an extrasolar planet.

Ultimately, said Ignasi Rablis of Spain’s Institute of Space Studies of Catalonia, lead author of the paper in journal Nature, the discovery was the result of 771 observations, an extremely high number.

And now, he said, “after a very careful analysis, we are over 99 percent confident the planet is there.”

The planet is at least 3.2 times the size of Earth and orbits near the snowline of the system, where water cannot be expected to ever be liquid.  That means is it a frozen world (an estimated -150 degrees Celsius) and highly unlikely to support life.

But Rablis and others on the large team say it also an extremely good candidate for future direct imaging and next-generation observing.

 

An artist’s rendering of the Barnard’s star planet at sunset. (Martin Kornmesser/ESO)

 

Thousands of exoplanets have been identified by now, and hundreds using the radial velocity method.  But this one is different.

“Barnard’s star is the ‘great white whale’ of planet hunting,” said Paul Butler, senior scientist at the Carnegie Institution, a radial velocity pioneer, and one of the numerous authors of the paper.

Because the star is so close (but 6 light-years away) and as a result so tempting, it has been the subject of exoplanet searches for 100 years, Butler said.  But until the radial velocity breakthroughs of the mid 1990s, the techniques used could not find a planet.… Read more

Planets Still Forming Detected in a Protoplanetary Disk

June 15, 2018 / / 0 Comments

An artist rendering of infant star HD 163296 with three protoplanets forming in its disk  The planets were discovered using a new mode of detection — identifying unusual patterns in the flow of gas within a protoplanetary disk. (NRAO/AUI/NSF; S. Dagnello)

Just as the number of planets discovered outside our solar system is large and growing — more than 3,700 confirmed at last count — so too is the number of ingenious ways to find exoplanets ever on the rise.

The first exoplanets were found by measuring the “wobble” in their host stars caused by the gravitational pull of the planets, then came the transit technique that measured dips in the light from stars as planets passed in front of them, followed by the direct imaging of moving objects deemed to be planets, and numerous more.

A new technique can now be added to the toolkit, one that is useful only in specific galactic circumstances but is nonetheless ingenious and intriguing.

By detecting unusual patterns in the flow of gas within the protoplanetary disk of a young star, two teams of astronomers have confirmed the distinct, telltale hallmarks of newly formed planets orbiting the infant star.

In other words, the astronomers found planets in the process of being formed, circling a star very early in its life cycle.

These results came thanks to the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), and are presented in a pair of papers appearing in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Richard Teague, an astronomer at the University of Michigan and principal author on one of the papers, said that his team looked at “the localized, small-scale motion of gas in a star’s protoplanetary disk. This entirely new approach could uncover some of the youngest planets in our galaxy, all thanks to the high-resolution images coming from ALMA.”

ALMA image of the protoplanetary disk surrounding the young star HD 163296 as seen in dust. ( ALMA: ESO/NAOJ/NRAO; A. Isella; B. Saxton NRAO/AUI/NSF.

To make their respective discoveries, each team analyzed the data from various ALMA observations of the young star HD 163296, which is about 4 million years old and located about 330 light-years from Earth in the direction of the constellation Sagittarius.

Rather than focusing on the dust within the disk, which was clearly imaged in an earlier ALMA observation, the astronomers instead studied the distribution and motion of carbon monoxide (CO) gas throughout the disk.

As explained in a release from the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, which manages the American operations of the multi-national ALMA, molecules of carbon monoxide naturally emit a very distinctive millimeter-wavelength light that ALMA can observe.

… Read more

© 2023 Many Worlds

Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑