Science and Technology Daily, Beijing, April 6 (Reporter Liu Xia) With the help of the Hubble Space Telescope, American scientists directly observed the formation process of the extrasolar Jupiter-like planet AB Aurigae b.
They point out that this violent process supports a long-debated theory of Jupiter's formation known as "disk instability," in which giant planets can form from large clumps of collapsing gas through a process of gravitational instability, while Not only can be formed by standard "nuclear accretion".
The research was published in the latest issue of the journal Nature Astronomy.
Astronomers believe that all planets are made of material originating in astrolabes.
The dominant theory for the formation of Jupiter-like planets is called "nuclear accretion," a "bottom-up" approach in which planets embedded in a circumstellar disk grow from small objects of varying sizes, forming a core that will Slowly build up gas from the astrolabe.
And "disk instability" is a "top-down" model, in which when a massive disk around a star cools, gravity causes the disk to rapidly disintegrate into one or more fragments, which subsequently form planets.
In the latest study, scientists used the Hubble Space Telescope and the Pleiades Telescope to detect and observe AB Aurigae b, which is about nine times the mass of Jupiter and orbits its host star twice as far as Pluto is from the sun.
They believe that Jupiter-sized planets take a long time to form through nuclear accretion at such great distances, so the Jupiter-like planet likely formed through "disk instability."
Study leader Tyne Curry, an astrophysicist at the Subaru Telescope and NASA's Ames Research Center, and others, compared data from the Hubble Space Telescope with data from the Hubble Space Telescope in Mauna Kea, Hawaii. A comparison of data from SCExAO, the state-of-the-art planet-imaging instrument on the summit's Subaru Telescope, confirmed their conclusions.
Alan Bosch of the Carnegie Institution for Science emphasized: "This new finding strongly demonstrates that some gas giant planets can form through a 'disk instability' mechanism. At the end of the day, gravity is what matters because stars The remnants of the formation process end up being pulled together by gravity and somehow form planets."
Understanding the early formation stages of Jupiter-like planets has important implications for scientists to better understand the evolution of massive gas giants, as well as help astronomers better understand the history of the solar system.
The researchers also plan to further study the chemical composition of protoplanets such as AB Aurigae with the help of NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, among others.