ALMA spots young star giving birth to planets

NEW DELHI : Using the new ALMA observatory, astronomers have for the first time seen planets forming around a young star located about 450 light years from Earth. The star is only a million years old and shrouded in a cloud of gas and dust. The powerful ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array) located in the Atacama desert in Chile could pierce through the dust to get exquisite images of planets' birth.

"This new and unexpected result provides an incredible view of the process of planet formation. Such clarity is essential to understand how our own Solar System came to be and how planets form throughout the Universe," said Tony Beasley, director of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) in Charlottesville, Virginia, which manages ALMA operations for astronomers in North America.

HL Tau is a Sun-like star located in the constellation Taurus. ALMA uncovered never-before-seen features, including multiple concentric rings separated by clearly defined gaps. These structures suggest that planet formation is already well underway around this remarkably young star.

All stars are believed to form within clouds of gas and dust that collapse under gravity. Over time, the surrounding dust particles stick together, growing into sand, pebbles, and larger-size rocks, which eventually settle into a thin protoplanetary disk where asteroids, comets, and planets form.

"These features are almost certainly the result of young planet-like bodies that are being formed in the disk. This is surprising since HL Tau is no more than a million years old and such young stars are not expected to have large planetary bodies capable of producing the structures we see in this image," said ALMA Deputy Director Stuartt Corder.

ALMA's power is achieved by spacing the antennas up to 15 kilometers apart. This gives the telescope enough resolution to see a penny placed more than 110 kilometers away. Future observations at ALMA's longest possible baseline of 16 kilometers will produce even clearer images and continue to expand our understanding of the cosmos.

"ALMA is delivering on its enormous potential for revealing the distant Universe and is playing a unique and transformational role in astronomy," said Fleming Crim, the National Science Foundation assistant director for Mathematical and Physical Sciences.

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