Astronomers say they’ve captured the first confirmed image of a planet forming in the dust swirling around a young star. They said the planet appears as a bright spot in the snapshot taken using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile.
Miriam Kepler of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany said hints of baby planets have been detected before, but astronomers weren’t sure whether those observations might simply be features in the swirling dust. In a paper to be published in Astronomy & Astrophysics , scientists describe the planet, located about three billion km from the star PDS 70, as a gas giant bigger than Jupiter. It has a cloudy atmosphere and a surface temperature of 1,000 degrees Celsius.
Published - July 02, 2018 08:30 pm IST
