Dear MEL Topic Readers,
First confirmed image of the birth of a planet
Far away from our solar system in the Centaurus constellation, a newborn yet still forming planet was discovered. By using a coronagraph to block the light from the young dwarf star PDS 70 light, two teams of researchers captured an image of the disk and the planet. It is a gigantic gas planet that is at least a few times the mass of Jupiter, but it takes 120 years to orbit its star because of the distance from the star that is equivalent as the one of Uranus. Despite the distance, the newly forming planet is over twice as hot as our hottest planet, Venus.
You may wonder why this discovery is so significant. That’s because the processes behind early stages of planetary evolution have never been clearly observed. If such observation is realized over time, we might be able to learn how the earth was formed 4.6 billion years ago.
Enjoy reading and learn about this baby planet that is 200 million light years away from earth.
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