For the first time ever, scientists have captured incredible images of an alien star system being born.
The image shows the very earliest moments of planet formation, when hot minerals are just beginning to solidify around a distant star, according to a statement. The researchers published their findings July 16 in the journal Nature.
Two telescopes worked together to reveal outflows of hot minerals around HOPS-315, which is a baby star like our sun roughly 1,300 light-years from Earth.
Initially, NASA‘s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) spotted “stuff coming from close to the star, but it wasn’t in the planet-forming region,” study co-author Edwin Bergin, a star formation specialist at the University of Michigan, told Live Science.
His team then used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), which is a set of antennas in the Chilean desert, to trace the outflow back to the protoplanetary disk — the dense disk of matter around a young star, where clumps of gas and dust can collapse into larger objects like planets.
“Then that unlocked everything,” Bergin said. It’s the first time that planet-forming solids have ever been detected, he said – which could help researchers better understand how our own solar system was born.
Our solar system came into existence roughly 4.5 billion years ago in a cloud of gas and dust. As our sun formed and evolved, other materials gradually condensed into small solids, which grew by colliding and accreting into asteroids and comets, then in some cases, planetesimals and planets.
The very earliest phases of this process are tough to spot in other systems, Bergin said, and the phase lasts just 100,000 to 200,000 years, he noted. But learning more about what happens in this moment is crucial, because when minerals begin to condense, organics also form.
The new image shows carbon monoxide – represented in orange – blowing away from the star in a butterfly-shaped outflow, with a blue…
Click Here to Read the Full Original Article at Latest from Live Science…