Reuters
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The illustration shows a large newly formed exoplanet called AB Aurigae b. The researchers used new and archival data from the Hubble Space Telescope and the Subaru Telescope to confirm that these protoplanets formed through an intense and violent process known as “disk instability”.
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Nationalgeographic.co.id – An international research team has discovered a new planet which is so young that it has not yet emerged from the womb of the matter in which it was formed. This is protoplanet youngest discovered to date. Its location and patterns of surrounding matter suggest that alternative methods of planet formation may be at work. The discovery could help explain the history and features of exoplanets seen around other stars.
These findings, which have been published in the journal Nature Astronomy on April 4, 2022, titled “Images of embedded Jovian planet formation at a wide separation around AB Aurigae”, thanks to NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, which recently captured the formation of this protoplanet through an ‘intense and violent process’. The planet is formed in a protoplanetary disk with a distinct spiral structure revolving around a young star that is about 2 million years old.
In the standard model of planet formation, a large gas planet like Jupiter begins as a rocky core in a protoplanetary disk around a young star. This core then collects gas from the disk, then grows into a giant planet.
While this model works well for planets in the Solar System, it has difficulty explaining exoplanets that have been found around other stars at much greater distances than the orbit of Neptune, the outermost planet of the solar system.
Rocky cores are not thought to have formed far from the central star, so core accretion could not encourage the formation of distant planets. One theory holds that the outer planets formed close to the central star and moved outward. But new observations using an extreme adaptive optical system that allow the Subaru Telescope to directly photograph faint objects close to brighter stars show what appear to be protoplanets in the process of forming directly at a distance of 93 au, which is more than three times the distance between the Sun. and Neptune.
NASA, ESA, Thayne Currie, Alyssa Pagan (STScI)
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Researchers were able to directly photograph the newly formed exoplanet AB Aurigae b over a span of 13 years using Hubble’s Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) and its Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrograph (NICMOS). At the top right, the NICMOS Hubble image taken by
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Analyze this object, named AB Auriga b. It is a planet that is claimed to be nine times larger than Jupiter. It orbits its parent star at a distance of 8.6 billion miles. At that distance, it would take a very long time.
Scientists think that this planet was formed at great distances due to the instability of the disk. And this goes against the widely accepted expectations of planet formation by the core accretion model.
For the analysis, the scientists combined data from two Hubble instruments: the Space Telescope’s Imaging Spectrograph and the Near Infrared Camera and the Multi-Object Spectrograph. They compared the data with a state-of-the-art planetary imaging instrument called SCExAO on Japan’s 8.2-meter Subaru Telescope located atop Mauna Kea, Hawaii.
“Interpreting this system is very challenging. This is one of the reasons why we needed Hubble for this project—clean images to better separate light from disks and any planets,” said Thayne Currie, lead author of the study.
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