Astronomers have found a monster-sized planet up to ten times the size of Jupiter, coming out of the stellar mist surrounding the young star.
Pre-observation of the approximately 13 million-year-old star MP Mus (also known as PDS 66), located about 280 light years away, failed to distinguish between the characteristics of the swirling clouds of gas and dust, or the protranetary disc surrounding it.
However, when astronomers revisited the star’s obviously uncharacteristic protoplanetary discs, they discovered that they may not be so lonely, using the combined data from Atacama’s massive millimeter/sub-millimeter array (ALMA) and the European Space Agency (ESA) Gaia Mission.
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The team detected a giant gas giant’s residence on a previously hidden protoplanetary disc of MP MUS. This represents Gaia’s first discovery of the “exoplanet” sitting on a protoplanetary disc.
Such detection was usually difficult due to interference from the gas and dust of the protoplanetary disc. Until now, astronomers have only had three powerful detections of planets within the protoplanet disk.
This new discovery could help astronomers hunt planets that have recently formed around infantile stars.
Young exoplanets enter the groove
Planets form within protoplanetary discs via a process called core accretion, where larger particles and larger particles stick together via gravity to form planets, asteroids and ultimately planets.
As the material of the protoplanetary disc is engulfed by this process, the created planet begins to carve the channel into a disk that resembles a groove in a vinyl record.
When this team first observed the protoplanetary discs around the MP Mus in 2023 with Alma, these were the kind of structures they were expected to see. The missing structure.
“We first observed this star when we learned that most discs have rings and gaps. I was hoping to find features around MP Mus, which suggests the existence of planets and planets,” said Alvaro Ribas, team leader at the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge, in a statement.
Instead, what the team found was a seemingly lonely star surrounded by distinctive discs of the distinctive gases and dust that form the planet.
“Our previous observations showed a boring flat disc,” Rivas said. “But this seemed strange to us, because the disks are from 7 million to 10 million years old.
“We expect to see evidence of planetary formation on discs of that age.”
As their curiosity peaked, the team prepared to relot again with the MP Mus using Alma, but with longer wavelength light. This allows them to go deeper into the disk, revealing a cavity in the disk close to the young star, and two more “holes” out, all of which were not previous observations.
Further evidence of MP Mus’ planetary companions was about to deliver.
More than Gaia’s first
As Rivas and his colleagues were considering Alma and MP Mus, Miguel Vioc, a researcher at the Observatory (ESO) in southern Europe, used the now retired star-tracking spaceship Gaia to see the young stars.
What Biock discovered was that the young star was “wobble.” This is usually the effect of planets in orbit pulled by a star by gravity, but Vioque knew up to that point that the MP Mus protoplanetary disc had been empty from a planetary perspective.
“My initial response was that MP Mus must have made a mistake in the calculations because it is known to have a disc with no feature,” explained Vioque. “When I saw Alvaro’s lecture presenting preliminary results of the newly discovered inner cavity in the disc, I was modifying the calculations. That is, the wobble I was detecting was real and more likely to be caused by the formation planet.”
The researchers gathered together GAIA and ALMA data with computer modeling assistance and determined that wobbling was likely caused by gas giants with masses of three to ten times greater than Jupiter.
This giant planet appears to orbit the MP Mus at a distance of 1-3 times the distance between Earth and the Sun.
“Our modeling work showed that placing a giant planet inside a newly discovered cavity could also explain the Gaia signal,” Rivas said. “And using the longer Alma wavelengths allowed us to see structures that were previously invisible.”
Not only is it the first time Gaia has discovered a planet within a protoplanetary disc, but it is the first time that an embedded exoplanet has been discovered indirectly by combining Gaia’s precise star movement data with the deep observations of Alma.
“I think this is one of the reasons why it’s difficult to detect young planets on Protranetary Disc, because in this case the data from Alma and Gaia were needed together,” Rivas said. “The long ALMA wavelength is very convenient, but it takes more time with the telescope to observe at this wavelength.”
Ribas hopes to be able to use deeper probes on the Protranetary Disc, using future Alma upgrades in addition to future stretching and stretching.
This could help us not only reveal the population of young embedded exoplanets that have not been discovered before, but also help us understand how our solar system turned out about 4.5 billion years ago.
The team’s investigation was published in Nature Astronomy on July 14th.
This article was originally published on Space.com
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