In this hypnotic picture, a young star called V960 Mon is surrounded by giant arms of cosmic dust that may eventually collapse to form a gas planet as massive as Jupiter.
There are two ways in which planets tend to develop. They are nuclear accretion and gravitational instability. In nuclear accretion, pieces of solid material around a star collide and slowly snowball into a planet.
But when gravity becomes unstable, the gas and dust contract into clumps that collapse under their own gravity to form the core of the planet. This is thought to occur farther from the star than nuclear accretion, where dust and gas are much cooler and lead to the formation of gas giants.
But so far, observations are lacking to prove exactly how planets are born from gravitational instability.
now, Philip Webber Dr. et al. of the University of Santiago, Chile, and his colleagues used the Spectral Polarization High Contrast Exoplanet Research (SPHERE) instrument at the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile to detect the planet-forming process in action and create the above image.
“Nobody had ever seen an actual observation before. “Gravitational instability is happening on a planetary scale, but never before,” Weber said in a statement.
V960 Mon is located in the constellation Monoceros, about 5000 light-years from Earth. Its name comes from the Greek word for unicorn. The star bursts with energy, emitting powerful jets of gas, creating giant spiral arms that stretch for miles across the entire solar system.
Weber and his colleagues also analyzed previous observations of V960 Mon by another telescope, the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array in Chile, and recognized that the spiral arms are undergoing fragmentation known as gas and dust mass formation. This process is thought to precede planet formation due to gravitational instability.
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