Zooming in on Possible Planet-forming V960 Mon Star | ESO

Zooming in on Possible Planet-forming V960 Mon Star | ESO

This video takes us on a journey to the V960 Mon star, some 5,000 light-years away from Earth. 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 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.

Credit: European Southern Observatory (ESO), N. Risinger, DSS, ESO/ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)/Weber et al.

Duration: 50 seconds

Release Date: July 25, 2023

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