– It is a fantastic privilege to be able to work with this and see planets being formed, says Per-Gunnar Valegård, who was involved in the mapping.
He is an astronomer at the University of Amsterdam and, together with colleagues around the world, has looked into star-forming regions in the constellations of Orion, Taurus and Chameleon.
Looks like an eye
4.5 billion years ago, the globe was formed in a disk like this around our newly ignited star – the sun. But what exactly our record looked like cannot be known. The 86 observed planetary discs show that there is a large variation in appearance.
– Some of the planetary discs are round and look like an eye with an iris, others have spiral shapes.
Planets thrive best with single stars
The largest proportion of stars in our Milky Way galaxy have formed in pairs, and hang together as a so-called double star. In the study now published in Astronomy & Astrophysics found very few binary stars that surrounded themselves with a planetary disk.
– When stars rotate around each other, they push the planetary disc so that it is destroyed.
The lack of planetary disks around binary stars is consistent with the observations made of exoplanets: A large majority are found around single stars, just like our Sun, which harbors a family of eight planets.
Play the video above to see what it looks like in the planet factory.
2024-03-17 01:32:49
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