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Planets

Footprints of forming planets spotted around young star

By Mike Wall Space.com
Published
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ALMA image of the dusty disk around the young star DM Tau. Two concentric rings, where planets may be forming, are visible.

A solar system similar to our own may be taking shape in the Taurus constellation.

The young star DM Tau, which lies about 470 light-years from Earth, was already known to host a ring of dust where planets are likely forming. But recent observations by the powerful Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile show there's considerably more to the story.

"Some studies suggested the radius of the ring is about where [our] solar system's asteroid belt would be. Other observations put the size out where Neptune would be," Tomoyuki Kudo, an astronomer at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, said in a statement.

"Our ALMA observations provided a clear answer: Both are right," added Kudo, the lead author of a recent study reporting the results. "DM Tau has two rings, one at each location."

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The team further identified a bright patch in the outer ring — a conglomeration of dust where a Neptune-like world may be coming together around DM Tau, which is thought to be 3 million to 5 million years old and half as massive as Earth's sun.

"We are also interested in seeing the details in the inner region of the disk, because the Earth formed in such an area around the young sun," co-author Jun Hashimoto, a researcher at the National Institutes of Natural Sciences' Astrobiology Center in Tokyo, said in the same statement. "The distribution of dust in the inner ring around DM Tau will provide crucial information to understand the origin of planets like Earth."

This is far from the first exoplanet baby picture captured by ALMA, a network of radio telescopes in northern Chile's Atacama Desert. ALMA has spotted similar dust rings around many stars, giving astronomers key glimpses at the planet-formation process.

The DM Tau results were published in November in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. The team also presented the study this month at the annual meeting of the Astronomical Society of Japan.

Original story on Space.com.