![]() ![]() They confirmed the presence of the spiral arms first detected by ALMA and also spotted another remarkable feature, a 'twist', that points to the presence of ongoing planet formation in the disc. With SPHERE's powerful imaging system, astronomers could see the fainter light from small dust grains and emissions coming from the inner disc. ![]() The SPHERE images are the deepest images of the AB Aurigae system obtained to date. Then, in 2019 and early 2020, Boccaletti and a team of astronomers from France, Taiwan, the US and Belgium set out to capture a clearer picture by turning the SPHERE instrument on ESO's VLT in Chile toward the star. In the ALMA images, scientists spotted two spiral arms of gas close to the star, lying within the disc's inner region. Observations of the AB Aurigae system made a few years ago with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA, in which ESO is a partner, provided the first hints of ongoing planet formation around the star. The very bright yellow 'twist' region close to the centre of the new AB Aurigae image, which lies at about the same distance from the star as Neptune from the Sun, is one of these disturbance sites where the team believe a planet is being made. As the planet rotates around the central star, this wave gets shaped into a spiral arm. Spirals of this type signal the presence of baby planets, which 'kick' the gas, creating "disturbances in the disc in the form of a wave, somewhat like the wake of a boat on a lake," explains Emmanuel Di Folco of the Astrophysics Laboratory of Bordeaux (LAB), France, who also participated in the study. The new images feature a stunning spiral of dust and gas around AB Aurigae, located 520 light-years away from Earth in the constellation of Auriga (The Charioteer). But until now astronomers had been unable to take sufficiently sharp and deep images of these young discs to find the 'twist' that marks the spot where a baby planet may be coming to existence. "We need to observe very young systems to really capture the moment when planets form," says Boccaletti. ![]() The new observations with ESO's VLT, published in Astronomy & Astrophysics, provide crucial clues to help scientists better understand this process. Astronomers know planets are born in dusty discs surrounding young stars, like AB Aurigae, as cold gas and dust clump together. "Thousands of exoplanets have been identified so far, but little is known about how they form," says Anthony Boccaletti who led the study from the Observatoire de Paris, PSL University, France. ![]()
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