Astronomers say they have captured the first confirmed image of a planet being born.
Astronomers led by a group at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany, said it used SPHERE — an instrument on the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope that can seek out planets — to snap an image of gas and dust forming near a young star.
The team also learned about the planet’s properties by measuring its brightness at different wavelengths.
The planet is about 3 billion kilometers away from the star, which is roughly the same distance between the sun and Uranus.
"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," said Miriam Keppler of the Max Planck Institute in a statement.
The star has been named PDS 70, with its corresponding new planet dubbed PDS 70b. In the image, the planet is shown to the right of the dark center of the image as a bright point, said astronomers. The center of the image contains a coronagraph which blocks the bright light of the central star.
An analysis shows PDS 70b is a giant gas planet with a mass a few times larger than Jupiter. The planet has a surface temperature of around 1000°C. By comparison, the hottest planet in our solar system, Venus, reaches a temperature of 462°C.
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