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Moon seen forming

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  • Moon seen forming

    Source: Alien moon likely seen forming in first-of-its-kind picture


    A dusty shroud around a far-off planet may represent the humble beginnings of a brand-new moon.


    In a possible first, a giant, faraway planet may have been caught in the act of growing moons.

    Seen in an image from the ALMA Observatory in Chile, the young planet orbits a small star roughly 370 light-years away, and it appears to be swaddled in a dusty, gassy disk—the exact type of structure scientists think produced Jupiter’s many moons billions of years ago.

    “It’s quite possible there might be planet-size moons in formation around it,” study leader Andrea Isella of Rice University says in a statement.

    “It’s certainly plausible that giant planets could have giant moon-forming disks around them,” says Stanford University’s Bruce Macintosh of the observation, published this week in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. “It’s an intriguing and quite possible result.”

    Sean Andrews of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics agrees, adding that he is optimistic that the image is a first of its kind.

    “If the result holds up,” he says “this will be an important ‘first strike.’”

    Spin right ‘round

    Astronomers have seen many similar dusty clouds surrounding stars. Called circumstellar disks, these structures are the milieu in which planets form—although the exact process by which worlds emerge from the dust is unknown. In some cases, astronomers think they can see newborn planets plowing lanes into these circumstellar disks, and ALMA has captured many images of these nascent planetary fingerprints.

    But until now, no one had seen a dusty disk surrounding a planet itself; it’s hard enough to directly image planets beyond our solar system, let alone see the diffuse clouds of debris hugging younger, giant worlds.

    Isella and his colleagues studied one dust-encircled star system, called PDS 70, using data gathered in 2017 by ALMA, an array of 66 radio dishes sprinkled over a patch of the Atacama desert. The star system includes a Jupiter-size planet called PDS 70b, which has vacuumed up a gap in the dusty shroud surrounding its small, six-million-year-old home star. Another planet, called PDS 70c, traces a path near the inner edge of the gap, at roughly the same distance from its star as Neptune is from the sun.

    Initially, the hazy area around PDS 70c looked like a faint arm of gas. But this year, when the team reprocessed the ALMA data using a slightly different method, the irregularities resolved into a dust ring. Isella and his colleagues interpret the newly processed image as depicting a circumplanetary debris disk, the type of structure from which moons grow and burgeoning planets siphon material.

    “We believe that Jupiter’s moons formed in a disk around the young Jupiter, and that circumplanetary disks play an important role in the formation of planets,” he says.



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  • #2
    I saw this! Neat!
    Glendower: I can call spirits from the vasty deep.
    Hotspur: Why, so can I, or so can any man;
    But will they come when you do call for them? Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 1, Act III:

    go with the flow the river knows . . .

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    I do not know, therefore everything is in pencil.

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