Category: Sphere

For the first time, astronomers captured a clear image of a young planet forming around a star. 

It was captured by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in the Atacama Desert in northern Chile. 

You can see the young planet, named PDS 70b, as a bright ball to the right of the center of the photograph above. It’s carving a path through what is known as a protoplanetary disc, the huge collection of gas and dust that surrounds younger stars. 

“These discs around young stars are the birthplaces of planets, but so far only a handful of observations have detected hints of baby planets in them,” Miriam Keppler, an astronomer at the Max Planck Institute of Astronomy (MPIA), which led the study, said in a statement. Read more…

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