In a first, astronomers capture direct image of newborn planet

Capturing newborn planets might be a thing now as for the first time ever astronomers have captured a clear and direct image of a baby planet being born.

Astronomers at the Max Planck institute, working along with the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile, captured a detailed image of a planet being born around 370 light years away from our planet Earth.

The gas giant planet, named ‘PDS 70b’ is about a few times the mass of our biggest planet Jupiter and was captured in between forming around a young star called ‘PDS 70’. The star is believed to be only 5.4 million years old, could be said a new born on the cosmological timescale.

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The image is of a bright object at the right of the center, taking shape inside a large cloud of gas and dust that surrounds new star, called a ‘protoplanetary disk’. The disk is made up of all the materials leftover when a new star is born and the dust within them unites to form new planets. The picture was captured using an instrument ‘coronagraph’ to block out light from the star, shown as the black circle in the image’s center, explained The Guardian.

Astronomers also figured out that the planet is 22 times farther from its star, a distance similar to the gap between Sun and Uranus and orbits its star in 120 years. Having a cloudy surface, the new planet is also much hotter as compared to any other planet in our Solar System, around 1000°C.

Though planets being born have been captured before, astronomers have always had their doubts of their authenticity. However, lead author of this study published in Astronomy & Astrophysics, Miriam Keppler is confident that this is the best detection of a planet being born around a star till now.

Keppler and the team plans on observing this forming start system too. For future, this success would help astronomers spotting more baby planets across the galaxy, wrote Mashable.