protoplanetary disks tagged posts

Astronomers agree that planets are born in protoplanetary disks – rings of dust and gas that surround young, newborn stars. While hundreds of these disks have been spotted throughout the universe, observations of actual planetary birth and formation have proved difficult within these environments.

Now, astronomers at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian have developed a new way to detect these elusive newborn planets — and with it, “smoking gun” evidence of a small Neptune or Saturn-like planet lurking in a disk. The results are described today in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

“Directly detecting young planets is very challenging and has so far only been successful in one or two cases,” says Feng ...

A series of new images reveals that planets form in organic soups – and no two soups are alike. Astronomers have mapped out the chemicals inside of planetary nurseries in extraordinary detail. The newly unveiled maps reveal the locations of dozens of molecules within five protoplanetary disks – regions of dust and gas where planets form around young stars.

“These planet-forming disks are teeming with organic molecules, some which are implicated in the origins of life here on Earth,” explains Karin Öberg, an astronomer at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA) who led the map-making project...

A team of scientists using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) to study the young star Elias 2-27 have confirmed that gravitational instabilities play a key role in planet formation, and have for the first time directly measured the mass of protoplanetary disks using gas velocity data, potentially unlocking one of the mysteries of planet fo...

A team including researchers from the Institute for Astrophysics of the University of Cologne has for the first time directly observed the columns of matter that build up newborn stars. This was observed in the young star TW Hydrae system located approximately 163 light years from Earth. This result was obtained with the Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI) and its GRAVITY instrument of the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Chile...