Swirling out of the stardust, a planet is born
MEET PDS 70b, the newest planet in the universe.
It is a little larger than Jupiter, sizzles at 1,000C and is just a few million years old.
This stunning image was captured as the planet, which looks little more than a golden blob, formed from vast swirls of gas and dust around a young star 370million light years away in the Milky Way.
Experts from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy believe the picture, the first glimpse of such a young planet, could help us unlock the secrets of Earth’s origins.
There are at least 100billion stars in our galaxy alone and almost every star is believed to have at least one planet – if not more. But there are still gaps in scientists’ knowledge on how they form.
What they do know is each planet is a ball of smouldering gas and dust, flung together to pull in even more gas and dust until it reaches planet- sized proportions.
This snapshot in space sheds new light on how long this process might take. The planet’s star, named PDS 70, is believed to be only five or six million years old, which means the planet was formed within this timeframe.
Scientists also believe the elaborate spirals and black voids seen in the discs surrounding stars are actually left by planets forming.
Miriam Keppler, who led the research team, said: ‘These discs around young stars are the birthplaces of planets, but so far only a handful of observations have detected hints of baby planets in them.’
Researchers used the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope to spot the planet. Measuring the rays of light it sends back to Earth gives them a world of information about life on PDS 70b.
They now know it is cloudy up there and a year lasts 118 times as long as one on Earth. Dr Andre Muller, another member of the team, said: ‘The majority of planets we know are found around older, mature stars for which the formation process has already finished. The detection of a young planet like this is crucial to better understand the evolution of our solar system.’