Scientists monitor the birth of a new moon in the sky
For the first time, scientists have been able to monitor a region where moons are forming around a planet outside our solar system, a Jupiter-like formation surrounded by a huge halo of gas and dust enough to give birth to 3 moons the size of ours.
The researchers used the ALMA telescope in the Atacama Desert in Chile, to observe the disk, which contains material accumulating on each other in a vortex-like motion around one of two newborn planets orbiting a young star called BDS 70 at a distance. Relatively close to Earth, it is 370 light-years away.
It is noteworthy that one light year is equivalent to a distance of approximately 9.5 trillion kilometers.
"These observations are unique so far and we have been waiting for a long time to put the theory of planet formation to the test and monitor the birth of planets and their moons as they occur," said astronomer, who led the study and published it Thursday in the "Astrophysical Journal Letters", Myriam Benesti of the University of Grenoble. .
The orange star "BDS 70" has approximately the same mass with the sun and is about 5 million light-years old, a blink of an eye in cosmic time, and the two planets are younger than it.
The moons are generated from these halos or disks surrounding the planets.
The researchers commented on the discovery by saying that it allows a deeper understanding of the formation process in the early life of planets and moons.
Outside our solar system, more than 4,400 planets have been discovered, but no disks around planets have been found before because all known exoplanets up to this point are in full-fledged solar systems except for the two newborn gas planets around the star "BDS 70".
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