Credit: ESO/F. Maio et al./T. Stolker et al./ ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)/N. van der Marel et al.

The image to the left, taken with ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), shows a possible planet being born around the young star HD 135344B. This star, located around 440 light-years away, is surrounded by a disc of dust and gas with prominent spiral arms. Theory predicts that planets can sculpt spiral arms like these, and the new planet candidate is located at the base of one of the arms, just as expected.  The image was captured with a new VLT instrument: the Enhanced Resolution Imager and Spectrograph (ERIS). The central black circle corresponds to a coronagraph –– a device that blocks the light of the star to reveal faint details around it. The white circle indicates the location of the planet.  The image to the right is a combination of previous observations taken with the SPHERE instrument also at the VLT (red) and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA, orange and blue). These and other previous studies of HD 135344B did not find signatures of a companion, but ERIS may have finally unveiled the culprit responsible for the star’s spiral disc. 

Provider: European Southern Observatory

Image Source: https://www.eso.org/public/images/eso2513a/

Curator: European Southern Observatory, Garching bei München, None, Germany

Image Use Policy: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License