Witnessing the formation of a planet with help of Hubble space telescope
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An illustration of the newly forming exoplanet PDS 70b, as to how the material may be falling onto the planet. Credits: NASA, ESA, STScl, Joseph Olmsted (STScl) |
Planets form from the disc of dust, as the dust particles accumulate and form bigger and bigger rocks, a planet's stars form. Now Hubble telescope has for the first time has seen exoplanets PDS 70b grow.
PDS 70b is located in the solar system known as PDS 70, and the bubble was able to see the growth of this exoplanet by using the observatory's ultraviolet sensitivities to capture radiation from extremely hot gas falling onto the planet. PDS 70b is a massive Jupiter-sized planet and orbits its star at the same distance as Uranus does from the Sun. The planet orbits the orange dwarf PDS 70, which also has two actively forming planets inside a huge disk of dust and gas, located 370 light-years from Earth in the constellation of Centaurus.
The planet began forming approximately 5 million years ago, and is at the end of its formation process, needless to say, it's a very young planet. This finding will help us understand how giant planets grow in remote solar systems, how planets grew in our own solar system 4.6 billion years ago, and also how the moon could have formed from the leftover in that disk of gas and dust.
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| Credit: Joseph DePasquale (STScl) |
These UV observations allowed the team of researchers to directly measure the planet's mass growth rate. As the PDS 70 system is still very young, it filled with primordial dust and gas disk, it fuels the growth of planets throughout the entire system, and the PDS 70b planet is filled with its own gas and dust disk which siphons material from the circumstellar disk. The researchers hypothesize that magnetic field lines from the circumstellar disk down to the planet's atmosphere are funneling material onto the planet's surface.
The team had to overcome the problem of the parent's star glare being too bright. AS the image was processed, the glare was removed, leaving the light from the planet.
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