Glimpse of baby planet shows what to expect when a star is expecting
Swirling, superheated hydrogen fueling the infant world’s growth
Like a cosmic sonogram, new images showcase an infant world growing in the planetary womb that encircles a young star. This is the first time researchers have observed a young planet actively feeding from the disk of gas in which it lives.
Light from hydrogen gas swirling around the planet gave the baby world away, researchers report November 18 in Nature. The glowing hydrogen is baked to about 10,000 degrees Celsius, nearly two times as hot as the surface of our sun. The only way to get the hydrogen that hot is if it is falling onto a fledgling planet no more than 10 times as massive as Jupiter, Stephanie Sallum, an astronomy graduate student at the University of Arizona in Tucson, and colleagues report.