Is This a Baby Picture of a Giant Planet?

Hubble optical image (left) and VLT infrared image (right) of the

circumstellar disk surrounding HD 100546. (ESO/NASA/ESA/Ardila et al.)

Excerpt from news.discovery.com




Mommy, where do baby planets come from? There’s no storks,

birds, bees, or romantic dinners for two involved in the answer to that

question — regardless of size, planets are all formed in pretty much the

same way: through the aggregation of material within the disk of dust

and gas surrounding a young star. While how long it actually takes and

just what sort of planets are most likely to form where are still topics

of discussion among astronomers, the birth process of a planet is

fairly well understood.

And this may be the very first image of it actually happening.



Acquired by the European Southern Observatory’s

Very Large Telescope (VLT), the infrared image above (right) shows a

portion of the disk of gas and dust around the star HD100546, located

335 light-years away in the constellation Musca. By physically blocking

out the light from the star itself by means of an opaque screen — seen

along the left side of the image — the light from the protoplanetary

disk around HD 100546 can be seen, revealing a large bright clump that’s

thought to be a planet in the process of formation.

If it is indeed a baby planet, it’s a big one — as large as, or perhaps even larger than, Jupiter.

This does raise an interesting question for astronomers because if it is

a Jupiter-sized planet, it’s awfully far from its star… at least

according to many current models of planetary formation. About 68 times

as far from HD100546 as we are from the sun, if this planet were in our

solar system it’d be located deep in the Kuiper Belt, twice as far as

Pluto. That’s not where one would typically expect to find gas giants,

so it’s been hypothesized that this protoplanet might have migrated

outwards after initially forming closer to the star… perhaps “kicked

out” by gravitational interaction with an even more massive planet.



Alternatively, it may not be a planet at all — the bright blob

in the VLT image might be coming from a much more distant source. While

extremely unlikely, further research will be needed to rule that

possibility out.

If it’s found to be a planet, HD100546 “b” would offer

scientists an unprecedented opportunity to observe a planetary formation

process in action — and from a relatively close proximity as well.

According to the team’s paper, submitted to Astrophysical Journal Letters, ”What

makes HD100546 particularly interesting is that 1. it would be the

first imaged protoplanet that is still embedded in the gas and dust disk

of its host star; and 2. it would show that planet formation does occur

at large orbital separations.”

(Now all we have to do is wait a couple billion years and then show these pictures to HD100546b’s girlfriend. How embarrassing!)

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Is This a Baby Picture of a Giant Planet?