Credit: ESO/A. Dasgupta/ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)/Weber et al.

This image shows a possible companion orbiting the young star V960 Mon. The star, located more than 5000 light-years away, is surrounded by a disc with intricate features. Previous analysis of the disc showed that it contains clumps of unstable material that could collapse to form a companion object. The new candidate found here could be either a planet or a brown dwarf –– an object bigger than a planet that didn’t gain enough mass to shine as a star.  The candidate object was found with ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), using its new Enhanced Resolution Imager and Spectrograph (ERIS). The new ERIS data are shown here in orange, overlaid on older images of the dusty disc as seen with the VLT’s SPHERE instrument (yellow) and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA, in blue). 

Provider: European Southern Observatory

Image Source: https://www.eso.org/public/images/eso2513g/

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

Image Use Policy: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License