Astronomers have glimpsed the gorgeous cosmic “phoenix,” a planetary system in the making.
Just as the mythical phoenix represents rebirth from fiery destruction, so this fiery bird-like cosmic cloud may signify the birth of a giant gaseous planet from clumps of material gathered around a newborn star from the ashes of an old, long-dead star. By studying the dusty clumps around the star called V960 Mon located about 5,000 light-years away, the Monoceros constellation can reveal how gas giant planets like Jupiter are born.
“This discovery is really exciting because it represents the first ever detection of clusters around a young star that have the potential to form giant planets.” he said in a statement.
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The gold-and-blue image of matter around V960 Mon, which glows bright blue at the heart of golden “wings” of surrounding gas and dust, was created by combined observations from the Very Large Telescope (VLT) and the Atacama Large Millimeter/Subarray Array (ALMA).
Watch the birth of a planetary system
Astronomers first turned their attention to the young star in 2014 when it unexpectedly brightened to about 20 times its usual size. Observations were taken with the REsearch (SPHERE) VLT Spectro-Polarimetric High Contrast Exoplanet Search (SPHERE) instrument shortly after this burst of brightness, with the instrument able to capture an unprecedented level of detail in the system.
This showed that the material orbiting V960 Mon forms a series of complex spiral arms that extend over distances greater than the entire solar system.
(left) V960 Mon appears as a golden, bird-shaped cloud in VLT images and (right) a blue gas glow seen by ALMA (Image credit: ESO/ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)/Weber et al.)
This discovery was confirmed when astronomers observed V960 Mon with ALMA. While VLT and SPHERE were able to examine surface details of the clumps of dust and gas, ALMA was able to look deeper, revealing to astronomers the internal structure of the system and, in doing so, the mechanism by which V960 Mon could form planets.
“With ALMA, it became clear that the spiral arms undergo fragmentation, which leads to the formation of clusters with masses similar to those of planets,” Zorlo said.
This image shows the sky around the location of the star V960 Mon. (Image credit: ESO/Digitized Sky Survey 2. Acknowledgments: David D. Martin)
Astronomers suggest two paths that gas giant planets could take. The first is core accretion, which sees dust grains clump together to cover a rocky core. The second is gravitational instability, in which extremely dense slabs of protoplanetary disk of gas and dust collapse around a star.
Scientists have seen hints of core accretion before, but the combined ALMA and SPHERE images give astronomers evidence of the first observational evidence of the gas giant’s recent formation mechanism.
“No one has ever seen a real observation of gravitational instability occur on a planetary scale — until now,” said scientist Philip Weber, a researcher at the University of Santiago, Chile.
The team intends to study this burgeoning planetary system further using the Future Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) currently under construction in the Atacama Desert region of northern Chile. The ELT should be able to reveal details of V960 Mon that are hidden even to the VLT and ALMA, including the chemical composition of clumps of matter around the star.
“Our group has been looking for signs of planet formation for over a decade, and we couldn’t be more thrilled with this amazing discovery,” said team member and researcher Sebastian Perez of the University of Santiago, Chile.
