Netherlands Research School for Astronomy (NOVA)
Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy (ASTRON)
Leiden University, Netherlands | 2018 Jun 26
A European team of astronomers has discovered that dust particles around a star already coagulate before the star is fully grown. Dust particle growth is the first step in the formation of planets. ...
In recent years, astronomers have discovered numerous planetary systems around other stars. Almost every star is likely to have at least one planet orbiting it. Some of the major questions are centered around how planetary systems form and how this process leads to the observed diversity of planets in numbers and masses. The results of a European research project suggest that planet formation starts very early in the star formation process.
The researchers used the Atacama Large Millimeter Array for their discovery. ALMA is a collection of 66 linked radio telescopes spread over 16 kilometer in the Atacama desert in Chile. The researchers pointed the telescope toward TMC1A, a still developing star in the constellation Taurus (the Bull).
The astronomers saw a striking lack of carbon monoxide radiation in a disc-shaped area near the star. They suspected that the radiation was blocked by big dust particles. Using numerical models, they could demonstrate that indeed the dust particles in the young protoplanetary disk have probably grown from a thousandth of a millimeter to a millimeter. ...
Evidence for the Start of Planet Formation in a Young Circumstellar Disk - Daniel Harsono et al
- Nature Astronomy (online 25 Jun 2018) DOI: 10.1038/s41550-018-0497-x