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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
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday July 03 2018, @02:32PM
It reminds me of these:
https://www.eurekalert.org/multimedia/pub/155180.php [eurekalert.org]
https://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1741/ [eso.org]
Although comparatively it is much more intuitive to understand what is happening in the PDS 70b image.
The good news is that the first of the extremely large telescope class [wikipedia.org] will be coming online fairly soon, namely the Giant Magellan Telescope (24.5 meter aperture) in 2023 and Extremely Large Telescope (39.3 meter) in 2024.
Unfortunately, ELT is a massive downgrade on what could have been:
Note that ELT's construction budget is about €1 billion. So for an estimated 50% more cost, and far under the budget of something like JWST, a telescope with about 8 times the light collecting area could have been built.
As good as adaptive optics have made ground telescopes, the future belongs to space telescopes. With increased payload sizes and new foldable designs, we could see something like the Kilometer Space Telescope [nasa.gov] go up, which would likely be impractical on the ground.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]