This ominous image shows the birth of a planet

Thursday, May 21, 2020 - 05:30 in Astronomy & Space

This image shows the disc around the young AB Aurigae star, where ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) has spotted signs of planet birth. (ESO/Boccaletti et al./)520 light-years away from Earth, a baby planet is born. While thousands of exoplanets have been identified so far, researchers at the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope, or VLT, in Chile, have captured the birth of a planet for the very first time. Nestled in a thick disc of dust and gas surrounding a young star named AB Aurigae, a fiery spiral twists around the planet’s site of birth. The rose-like spirals, which often herald the birth of baby planets, signify how the young objects disrupt the gas, causing waves as if it were a boat on a lake. The dandelion yellow twist region near the spiral’s center lies at the same distance from the star as Neptune from the Sun, or around 2.8...

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