Credit: ESO/C. Ginski et al.

Astronomers may have caught a still-forming planet on camera, hidden somewhere in this stellar snapshot. Today’s Picture of the Week is a close-up of the star RIK 113, seen here surrounded by a cloud of gas and dust called a protoplanetary disc. These discs are a common feature around young stars, containing all the building blocks needed to make a new planet. Over time, these dusty discs will fragment and condense under the influence of gravity, forming larger objects like protoplanets. These planetary embryos carve out gaps in the dust around them, forming the intricate, ring-like structures that we can see in this disc.  The true complexity of this protoplanetary disc was first uncovered by the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in a study published last year. These results showed the presence of a gap, which hinted at a planet-like object embedded within it. This prompted another team of astronomers, led by Christian Ginski at the University of Galway, Ireland, to follow up with observations from ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT). Using the SPHERE instrument they found that the inner ring has intriguing spiral features. A detailed analysis of the data uncovered not just one, but two potential signals from planets around RIK 113, not far from the original detection with ALMA. For now, these signals are still more of a suggestion than a direct confirmation. However, with two separate studies from both ALMA and the VLT indicating the presence of at least one planet, these results are extremely promising for a future discovery. Link Research paper, accepted for publication in Astronomy & Astrophysics

Provider: European Southern Observatory

Image Source: https://www.eso.org/public/images/potw2523a/

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

Image Use Policy: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License