The likely site of a new “gas giant planet” up to several times the mass of Jupiter, has been discovered by an international research team led by University of Galway astronomers.
Using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT) in Chile, the team has captured images around a distant young star revealing a “new planet-forming disc” for the first time.
The landmark study was led by Dr Christian Ginski from the Centre for Astronomy in the School of Natural Sciences at University of Galway. It was co-authored by four postgraduate students at the university: Chloe Lawlor, Jake Byrne, Dan McLachlan and Matthew Murphy.
Published in the International Journal of Astronomy and Astrophysics, the paper’s research team also included colleagues in the UK, Germany, Australia, USA, Netherlands, Italy, Chile, France and Japan.
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It suggests the possible presence of a planet based on the disc’s structure, which includes visible rings and spirals.
Principal researcher Dr Ginski called the image “something special”, anticipating that the discovery will “bring us one step closer to understand how planets form in general and how our solar system might have formed in the distant past”.
“While our team has now observed close to 100 possible planet-forming discs around nearby stars, this image is something special,” he said.
“One rarely finds a system with both rings and spiral arms in a configuration that almost perfectly fits the predictions of how a forming planet is supposed to shape its parent disc according to theoretical models.”
The disc extends 130 astronomical units out from its “parent star” – the equivalent to 130 times the distance between Earth and the sun. It shows a bright ring followed by a gap centred at roughly 50 astronomical units.
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By comparison, Neptune – the outermost planet in our solar system – has an orbital distance from the sun of 30 astronomical units.
The inner part of this planet-forming system measures 40 astronomical units in radius, large enough to “swallow all of the planets in our own solar system”.
Based on their research findings, Dr Ginski and his team have secured time at the world leading James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) observatory during the upcoming observation cycle.
Here, they hope to take an image of the young planet to determine whether planets exist in the disc, as suggested.
