An international team of astronomers has managed to capture some extraordinarily rare images of planetary systems being born, hundreds of light-years away.
While we've seen images of "protoplanetary disks" before, we've never seen the process captured in such detail.
"In [earlier] pictures, the regions close to the star, where rocky planets form, are covered by only few pixels," lead author Jacques Kluska, from KU Leuven in Belgium, said in a statement .
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A Rare Glimpse Into a Solar System's Beginnings - The Atlantic
Many moons ago, before the pandemic—before we even had moons—our home in the universe was a ring of glowing material, with the young sun in the center, like a donut sprinkled with cosmic dust and gas. Round and round the disk went, whisking particles around, until the material began to stick together in clumps. After millions of years, the clumps curved into the planets and the moons as we know them today, a rich assortment of worlds.
This is our story, but it has happened— is happening—countless times across the cosmos, around other stars. Astronomers have long known about such swirling structures, known as protoplanetary disks, which are the leftovers from the fiery birth of new suns. Telescopes have even managed to observe them in stunning detail (well, as stunningly detailed as you can get many light-years from Earth).
May guide to the bright planets | Bonners Ferry, Idaho | kootenaivalleytimes.com
During the most of May 2020, the dazzling planet Venus appears between the bright stars Capella and Betelgeuse.
You can see all 5 bright planets in May 2020. Dazzling Venus is your ticket to finding Mercury in the evening sky. Brilliant Jupiter can help you find Saturn and Mars in the morning sky.
Venus – the brightest planet – blazes mightily in the western sky after sunset. Given clear skies, it'll be hard to miss Venus, the third-brightest celestial body to light up the heavens, after the sun and moon, respectively. Some sharp-sighted people can even see Venus in a daytime sky.
No Blue Skies for Super-Hot Planet WASP-79b
The 1927 song, "Blue Skies,' by celebrated American composer Irving Berlin, was an instant hit, and even featured in the very first Hollywood "talking picture," the Jazz Singer.
This is a moot point regarding lyricist Berlin, because WASP-79b is a hellish class of planet that is unlike anything found in our solar system, or frankly, ever imagined by most astronomers. For want of a better word, astronomers simply call these planets "hot Jupiters." They are the size of Jupiter, or larger, but are so close to their star they complete one full orbit in a matter of days – or even hours.
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Six-Planet Star System Discovered Where Worlds Orbit in Near-Perfect Rhythm
Researchers have discovered a star system with six planets whose orbits are in almost perfect rhythm.
According to a study published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics , the star, dubbed HD 158259, is orbited by a "super-Earth" and "five mini-Neptunes."
This in itself is unusual, given that astronomers only know of around dozen star systems containing six or more planets. However, what makes the HD 158259 system so remarkable is the exceptionally regular spacing of its planets.
This was the most dangerous place in our planet's history - CNN
Newly discovered exoplanet dethrones former king of Kepler-88 planetary system: Astronomer
Our solar system has a king. The planet Jupiter, named for the most powerful god in the Greek pantheon, has bossed around the other planets through its gravitational influence. With twice the mass of Saturn, and 300 times that of Earth, Jupiter's slightest movement is felt by all the other planets. Jupiter is thought to be responsible for the small size of Mars, the presence of the asteroid belt, and a cascade of comets that delivered water to young Earth.
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A team of astronomers led by the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy (UH IfA) has discovered a planet three times the mass of Jupiter in a distant planetary system.
Astronomers capture rare images of planet-forming disks around stars
Before this new study, several pictures of these disks had been taken with the largest single-mirror telescopes, but these cannot capture their finest details. "In these pictures, the regions close to the star, where rocky planets form, are covered by only few pixels," says lead author Jacques Kluska from KU Leuven in Belgium. "We needed to visualize these details to be able to identify patterns that might betray planet formation and to characterize the properties of the disks.
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Kluska and his colleagues created the images at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Chile by using a technique called infrared interferometry. Using ESO's PIONIER instrument, they combined the light collected by four telescopes at the Very Large Telescope observatory to capture the disks in detail. However, this technique does not deliver an image of the observed source. The details of the disks needed to be recovered with a mathematical reconstruction technique.
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Sometimes, photos of Earth can look so beautiful you don't even believe the images are from this planet. Count thes… https://t.co/5Ur6RIM4oT WIREDScience (from San Francisco, California) Sat May 02 19:55:25 +0000 2020
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