Scientists Captured a Planet's Birth and It Is Terrifying and Beautiful - VICE

Scientists Captured a Planet's Birth and It Is Terrifying and Beautiful - VICE



This telltale ‘twist’ marks the site where a planet may be forming (ESO/Boccaletti et al.)

A planet is born

Astronomers have captured stunning images of a planet forming at the heart of a spiralling disc of gas and dust near AB Aurigae, a star located around 520 light years from Earth. The snap was taken using a near-infrared camera on the Very Large Telescope in Chile. To get better contrast, researchers used a ‘coronagraph’ to block out the star’s light. But even then, it isn’t possible to glimpse the baby planet itself. “We see the structure that the planet produces on the spiral — this is what we call a twist,” says astronomer Anthony Boccaletti.

Vice | 4 min readSource: Astronomy & Astrophysics paper