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takyon writes:

It's Official: Astronomers Caught The First-Ever Direct Picture of a Planet Being Born

For the very first time, astronomers have captured an image of a baby planet as it carves a path through the disc of dust that surrounds its star, an orange dwarf 113.4 parsecs (370 light-years) away from Earth.

[...] PDS 70 has a few features that made it a good candidate for this sort of search. Its protoplanetary disc is large, spanning a radius of around 130 astronomical units (the distance between Earth and the Sun; the Kuiper belt only goes up to about 50 au).

[...] Using its coronagraph and polarisation filters, the [Very Large Telescope] team discovered a very large planet orbiting in the gap in PDS 70's protoplanetary disc - which means it's probably still in the process of accumulating material. Further analysis of the planet, described in a second paper, was conducted based on its spectrum. Its mass is several times that of Jupiter, and its orbit is around 22 AU, just a little bit farther than Uranus's orbit around the Sun. It takes about 120 Earth years to complete one orbit around its star, and its surface temperature is around 1,200 Kelvin.

PDS 70. Also at ESO and Syfy Wire.

Discovery of a planetary-mass companion within the gap of the transition disk around PDS 70

Orbital and atmospheric characterization of the planet within the gap of the PDS 70 transition disk

Original Submission