planet-forming disk tagged posts

The discovery of ancient water in a planet-forming disk reveals that some of the water found in comets—and maybe even Earth—is older than the disk’s star itself, offering breakthrough insights into the history of water in our solar system.

Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) have made a first-ever detection of doubly deuterated water (D₂O, or “heavy water”) in a planet-forming disk around V883 Ori, a young star...

Artist’s conception. Credit: courtesy of Robin Dienel

When a star is young, it is often still surrounded by a primordial rotating disk of gas and dust, from which planets can form. Astronomers like to find such disks because they might be able to catch the star partway through the planet formation process, but it’s highly unusual to find such disks around brown dwarfs or stars with very low masses. New work from a team led by Anne Boucher of Université de Montréal, and including Carnegie’s Jonathan Gagné and Jacqueline Faherty, has discovered 4 new low-mass objects surrounded by disks.

3 of 4 objects discovered by these researchers are quite small, somewhere between only 13 and 18 times the mass of Jupiter. The fourth has about 120 times Jupiter’s mass...