Ever wonder how stars and planets form? New clues have been found in the protoplanetary system Herbig-Haro 30 by the James Webb Space Telescope, Hubble and the Earth-bound telescope ALMA. The observations show, that large dust grains are more concentrated into a central disk where they can form planets. The featured image from Webb shows many attributes of the HH-30 system. Jets of particles are being expelled vertically, shown in red, while a dark dust-rich disk is seen across the center, blocking the light from the star or stars still forming there. Blue-reflecting dust is seen in an arc above and below the central disk, although why a tail appears on the lower left is currently unknown. Studying how planets form in HH 30 can help astronomers better understand how planets in our own Solar System once formed, including the Earth.
Image Credit & Copyright: James Webb Space Telescope, ESA, NASA & CSA, R. Tazaki et al.
"...billions of years later, some remote clumps of meat would fall together to make a place made *entirely* of meat, called 'The Meat Planet' - an interstellar, gastronomic delicacy."
While JWST has opened up much that was not visible before it in the early universe, it is not so easy to get the kind of images that could show us, however an early analogue of those times is NGC 346, a metal poor cluster of stars may give us some clues, and the above JWST image of this cluster didn't disappoint.
The research shows that not only do planetary systems begin to form around stars, but that the process lasts a lot longer than in clusters with metal rich environments.
Ironically though, JWST has also shown us, that the early universe was not as metal poor as we first assumed, but still a fascinating bit of research, no doubt forming many large gas giants simply because there was little to no rock with which to form rocky planets like ours.
"Astronomers spot young planet shaping spiral arms in dusty stellar disk"
"The image to the left, taken with ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT), shows a possible planet being born around the young star HD 135344B. This star, located around 440 light-years away, is surrounded by a disk of dust and gas with prominent spiral arms. Theory predicts that planets can sculpt spiral arms like these, and the new planet candidate is located at the base of one of the arms, just as expected. The image was captured with a new VLT instrument: the Enhanced Resolution Imager and Spectrograph (ERIS). The central black circle corresponds to a coronagraph––a device that blocks the light of the star to reveal faint details around it. The white circle indicates the location of the planet. The image to the right is a combination of previous observations taken with the SPHERE instrument also at the VLT (red) and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA, orange and blue). These and other previous studies of HD 135344B did not find signatures of a companion, but ERIS may have finally unveiled the culprit responsible for the star's spiral disk. Credit: ESO/F. Maio et al./T. Stolker et al./ ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)/N. van der Marel et al."
ALMA has spotted ring and spiral structures in protoplanetary disks just 300,000 or so years old.
Clouds of dust and gas not far from our solar system are giving astronomers a rare glimpse into the earliest stages of planet formation.
These clouds, which are between 200,000 and 500,000 years old and lie within 700 light-years of Earth, have been spotted hosting dusty, gas-rich disks around a central star — the birthplaces of planets. Photos of these features, captured by the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), were unveiled on Monday (Jan. 8) at the American Astronomical Society conference being held in New Orleans and online.
The project of covering every big object in the Solar System, including planets, moons, asteroids, Theia (here she finally is!), ʻOumuamua, and Planet 9.
Hubble Finds a Planet Forming in an Unconventional Way | NASA
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has directly photographed evidence of a Jupiter-like protoplanet forming through what researchers describe as an "intense and violent process." This discovery supports a long-debated theory for how planets like Jupiter form, called "disk instability."
The new world under construction is embedded in a protoplanetary disk of dust and gas with distinct spiral structure swirling around surrounding a young star that’s estimated to be around 2 million years old. That's about the age of our solar system when planet formation was underway. (The solar system's age is currently 4.6 billion years.)
"Nature is clever; it can produce planets in a range of different ways," said Thayne Currie of the Subaru Telescope and Eureka Scientific, lead researcher on the study.
All planets are made from material that originated in a circumstellar disk. The dominant theory for jovian planet formation is called "core accretion," a bottom-up approach where planets embedded in the disk grow from small objects – with sizes ranging from dust grains to boulders – colliding and sticking together as they orbit a star. This core then slowly accumulates gas from the disk. In contrast, the disk instability approach is a top-down model where as a massive disk around a star cools, gravity causes the disk to rapidly break up into one or more planet-mass fragments.
The newly forming planet, called AB Aurigae b, is probably about nine times more massive than Jupiter and orbits its host star at a whopping distance of 8.6 billion miles – over two times farther than Pluto is from our Sun. At that distance it would take a very long time, if ever, for a Jupiter-sized planet to form by core accretion. This leads researchers to conclude that the disk instability has enabled this planet to form at such a great distance. And, it is in a striking contrast to expectations of planet formation by the widely accepted core accretion model.
The new analysis combines data from two Hubble instruments: the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph and the Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrograph. These data were compared to those from a state-of-the-art planet imaging instrument called SCExAO on Japan's 8.2-meter Subaru Telescope located at the summit of Mauna Kea, Hawaii. The wealth of data from space and ground-based telescopes proved critical, because distinguishing between infant planets and complex disk features unrelated to planets is very difficult. ...
Infrared images show a spiral of gas and dust around a star 520 light-years away. A smaller, tantalizing twist hints at where a planet is coalescing.
For the first time, astronomers may have seen direct evidence of a planet forming around a young star.
A spiral disk of gas and dust surrounding the star AB Aurigae contains a small S-shaped twist near the spiral’s center, infrared telescope images show.
That twist “is the precise spot where a new planet must be forming,” says astrophysicist Emmanuel Di Folco of the University of Bordeaux in France.
Previously, astronomers have seen gaps (SN: 11/6/14) and large-scale spirals (SN: 6/14/18) that are thought to be created by unseen planets in disks of gas and dust around young stars. Theories of how planets coalesce and gather material from these disks predict that planets’ motions would further twist the gas around them like swirling skirts, pinpointing a planet’s location (SN: 5/11/18).
Now, Di Folco and colleagues have used infrared observations from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array and the Very Large Telescope, both in Chile, to find a spiral and zero in on one such S-shaped twist around AB Aurigae. The team describes its findings in the May Astronomy & Astrophysics.
A close-up of the disk of gas and dust (seen here in infrared light) around the young star AB Aurigae (left) reveals a bright knot (right, circled in white) where astronomers think a planet is coalescing. For scale, the blue circle represents the size of Neptune’s orbit.
A. BOCCALETTI ET AL/ASTRONOMY & ASTROPHYSICS 2020, ESO
“It was amazing,” Di Folco says. “It was exactly as we were expecting from the theoretical predictions of planet formation.”
The star, about 520 light-years away in the constellation Auriga, is just 4 million years old, about one one-thousandths of the age of the sun. “It’s really a baby,” Di Folco says.
The potential planet’s exact mass is not known, but it probably would have to be a gas giant like Jupiter rather than a rocky planet like Earth to make such big waves in the disk. And it might not be alone — there’s a hint of another planet near the disk’s outer edge.
Zooming in on the star AB Aurigae, located about 520 light-years away in the constellation Auriga, reveals a swirl of gas and dust that includes a small S-shaped region where a new planet may be forming.
