THE STUNNING formation of a planet has been caught on camera – and it’s unlike anything scientists have seen before.
A gas giant was recently captured at the earliest stage of birth scientists have ever observed, according to a new study published on Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy.
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Designated AB Aurigae b, the baby exoplanet was photographed about 508 light-years outside of our solar system via Nasa’s Hubble Space Telescope and the Subaru telescope in Hawaii.
“We think it is still very early on in its ‘birthing’ process,” said astrophysicist Thayne Currie of the Nasa-Ames research center and lead author of the study.
“Evidence suggests that this is the earliest stage of formation ever observed for a gas giant.”
The protoplanet – a term for a planet that is still in the process of formation – is emerging at an unusually large distance away from its sun, AB Aurigae.
This is strange because all other known exoplanets orbit their stars at a distance equivalent to our sun and its most faraway planet Neptune, or less.
AB Aurigae b, however, is about three times as far as Neptune from the sun and 93 times Earth’s distance from the sun.
What’s more, evidence suggests that the exoplanet is forming through a top-down gravitational collapse of clouds of gas, rather than the more commonly-observed gradual accumulation of dust and rocks.
This indicates that there is more than one way for a planet to form.
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“The conventional thinking is that most – if not all – planets form by slow accretion of solids onto a rocky core, and that gas giants go through this phase before the solid core is massive enough to start accreting gas,” said astronomer and study co-author Olivier Guyon.
“This process cannot form giant planets at a large orbital distance, so this discovery challenges our understanding of planet formation,” Guyon said.
Astronomers are instead proposing that AB Aurigae b may be forming because the disk around its sun is cooling, causing gravity to fragment into one or more massive clumps that form into planets.
“There’s more than one way to cook an egg,” Currie said. “And apparently there may be more than one way to form a Jupiter-like planet.”
AB Aurigae b is already nine times the mass of Jupiter and is one of the largest gas giant exoplanets we’ve ever observed.
Had it been slightly larger, it would fall into the category of a brown dwarf, or a celestial body between a planet and a star.
The team of researchers has recognized the significance of the new findings, adding that “nature is clever; it can produce planets in a range of different ways”.
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“New astronomical observations continuously challenge our current theories, ultimately improving our understanding of the universe,” Guyon said.
“Planet formation is very complex and messy, with many surprises still ahead.”
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