For the first time observed traces of gas in a very distant planetary system in formation.
The observations, made with the Alma telescope (Atacama Large Millimeter / submillimeter Array), in Chile, were analyzed under the guidance of Jaehan Bae, of the University of Florida.
Published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, the result allows us to understand the process by which an atmosphere is formed around the planets.
To understand how planets like the Earth formed the entire Solar System, the best method is to study distant planetary systems still in the process of formation, in which young stars are still surrounded by huge clouds of dust from which new ones slowly take shape. planets.
One of the biggest problems, however, is the enormous distance that separates us from other stars, but thanks to the incredible power of new telescopes like Alma we are managing for the first time to be able to carry out detailed analyzes.
After the first photograph, taken in 2019 by Alma, of the formation of a moon around an exoplanet, now comes the first image of free gas among the dust of a so-called accretion disk, the one from which the planets are born.
Those gases could one day form the atmosphere of the forming planet.
The observation was made around the star
AS209
, about 395 light years from Earth, and shows the gases swirling near a forming planet orbiting the star at about 200 times the Sun-Earth distance.
Furthermore, the star is said to be very young, at just 1.6 million years of age, and therefore the one discovered could be the youngest planetary system ever discovered.
"We are having a very exciting time where this happens thanks to powerful telescopes, such as Alma and James Webb," said Jaehan Bae.
