Secrets of Planet Birth around Star V960 Mon | ESO

Secrets of Planet Birth around Star V960 Mon | ESO

The background of this image is dark, but in its center lurks a swirling ghostly figure, which extends towards the edge of the picture. At the very center there is a small bright region and erupting out of it there is a poorly defined, fuzzy edged cloud and blobs of material in yellow and blue, respectively. The yellow cloud extends far out in the image, making an elongated spiral shape that gets dimmer and less defined as it reaches the top and bottom of the frame. Meanwhile, the blue blobs only extend downwards from the center and to a fraction of the distance of the yellow spiral cloud. The blobs twist away from the central bright region, forming a tight U-shape lying on its right side.

A spectacular new image released today by the European Southern Observatory (ESO) gives us clues about how planets as massive as Jupiter could form. Using ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), researchers have detected large dusty clumps, close to a young star, that could collapse to create giant planets.

“This discovery is truly captivating as it marks the very first detection of clumps around a young star that have the potential to give rise to giant planets,” says Alice Zurlo, a researcher at the Universidad Diego Portales, Chile, involved in the observations.

The work is based on a mesmerising picture obtained with the Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast Exoplanet REsearch (SPHERE) instrument on ESO’s VLT that features fascinating detail of the material around the star V960 Mon. This young star is located over 5,000 light-years away in the constellation Monoceros and attracted astronomers’ attention when it suddenly increased its brightness more than twenty times in 2014. SPHERE observations taken shortly after the onset of this brightness ‘outburst’ revealed that the material orbiting V960 Mon is assembling together in a series of intricate spiral arms extending over distances bigger than the entire Solar System.

This finding then motivated astronomers to analyse archive observations of the same system made with ALMA, in which ESO is a partner. The VLT observations probe the surface of the dusty material around the star, while ALMA can peer deeper into its structure. “With ALMA, it became apparent that the spiral arms are undergoing fragmentation, resulting in the formation of clumps with masses akin to those of planets,” says Zurlo.

Astronomers believe that giant planets form either by ‘core accretion’, when dust grains come together, or by ‘gravitational instability’, when large fragments of the material around a star contract and collapse. While researchers have previously found evidence for the first of these scenarios, support for the latter has been scant.

“No one had ever seen a real observation of gravitational instability happening at planetary scales—until now,” says Philipp Weber, a researcher at the University of Santiago, Chile, who led the study published today in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

“Our group has been searching for signs of how planets form for over ten years, and we couldn't be more thrilled about this incredible discovery,” says team-member Sebastián Pérez from the University of Santiago, Chile.

This research is presented in a paper to appear in The Astrophysical Journal Letters: https://www.eso.org/public/archives/releases/sciencepapers/eso2312/eso2312a.pdf

Credit: European Southern Observatory (ESO)

Release Date: July 25, 2023

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