Artist’s illustration of a giant gas planet forming around a baby star.
REPUBLIKA.CO.ID, JAKARTA — Astronomers use the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to hunt for sightings of exoplanets or newly formed exoplanets. A high-sensitivity infrared instrument has been added to the mission.
Quoted from the page Space, Friday (5/4/2024), the research team consisted of scientists from the University of Michigan, the University of Arizona, and the University of Victoria. They sought to see the appearance of “baby” planets, swirling clumps of gas and dust in protoplanetary disks.
Lots of plates protoplanet It has been documented, but astronomers have only glimpsed the formation of planets within it a few times to date. Now, the team is using a large scope to observe the protoplanetary disks of HL Tau, SAO 206462, and MWC 758.
The observations also use data collected by the Hubble Space Telescope and the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) in the hope of seeing planet formation. The investigation also seeks to uncover never-before-seen interactions between the protoplanetary disk and the gas envelope.
“Essentially, in every disk we’ve observed with high enough resolution and sensitivity, we’ve seen large structures like gaps, rings, and, in the case of SAO 206462, spiral structures,” said team member and University of Michigan astronomer Gabriele Cugno.
Most of these structures can be explained by the formation of planets interacting with disk material, but there are also some that cannot yet be explained. If the team eventually manages to spot newly formed exoplanets, they hope to link some structures to their formers and understand how planets and planetary systems evolve as planets.
In particular, Cugno led JWST’s observations of the protoplanetary disk around the protostar SAO 206462. A protostar is a stellar body that does not yet have enough mass to trigger the fusion of hydrogen into helium in its core.
In the protoplanetary disk around SAO 206462, the team saw signals of planet formation, but it wasn’t the planet they expected to see. Some simulations show that the planet should be inside the disk, very massive, big, hot and bright.
But researchers don’t…
2024-04-05 09:19:39
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