The First Image of a Baby Planet Captured by Astronomers Recently
These days, the science world has been shaken by an unexpected announcement. Astronomers from Berlin say that they have captured the first image of a new planet. It looks like ”the birth” is taking place in the dust which is spinning around a young star.
The baby planet has been spotted for the first time on Monday, July 2nd. The Very Large Telescope from the European Southern Observatory in Chile managed to take a snapshot of a bright spot which is actually the mentioned planet.
A scientist from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany, Miriam Kepler, declared that they have detected some clues that baby planets could appear even before the outstanding discovery. However, astronomers were not sure if they spotted a new planet or some characters moving around in the dust.
How can the astronomers be sure that their discovery is real?
Miriam Kepler added that the disks gravitating around young stars are the actual birthplaces of new planets, but very few observations detected any signs of baby planets there so far. If you were wondering where they could have been until now, the astronomer added that the ”babies” might have been hidden inside the disks.
What do they know about the planet?
Space.com reports say that, according to calculations and deep analysis, the newly discovered planet, also known as PDS 70b, is a has giant two to three times bigger than Jupiter and placed at about the same distance from the sun as Uranus. This means that the atmosphere around it is cloudy and the surface temperature can reach 1,000 degrees Celsius (which means 1,832 degrees Fahrenheit).
Another scientist who took part in the research connected with the discovery, André Müller, stated that the latest findings let them see the complex early stages of planetary evolution through a new window. So far, they didn’t manage to deeply understand this process, but now they are heading towards the right direction.
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