New Method for Detecting Newborn Planets May Revolutionize Astronomy

Astronomers today comprehend the fundamentals of how planets are brought into existence yet have failed to observe the process so far, despite using state-of-the-art resources.

Now, a team of astronomers at the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard & Smithsonian have engineered a new means to spot these elusive newborn planets, according to news published by the institution Thursday.

You can read the findings in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Directly detecting the birth of a planet

Feng Long, a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Astrophysics that led the study, stated, “Directly detecting young planets is very challenging and has so far only been successful in one or two cases”.

“The planets are always too faint for us to see because they’re embedded in thick layers of gas and dust.”

This signifies that researchers have no alternative but to search for signs to deduce if a planet is developing within the dust and debris.

“In the past few years, we’ve seen many structures pop up on disks that we think are caused by a planet’s presence, but it could be caused by something else too,” Long stated.

 “We need new techniques to look at and support that a planet is there.”

Long drew these conclusions after thoroughly examining a protoplanetary disk named LkCa 15, situated 518 light years away. Previously there had been claims of planet developments in the disk that arose from observations with the ALMA Observatory.

Long analyzed high-resolution ALMA data on LkCa 15 from 2019 and found two faint yet important features that other astronomers had overlooked.

Located at approximately 42 times the distance from Earth to the Sun and appearing like a dusty ring with two different and bright batches of material orbiting within it.

A small clump and a larger arc

The best way to explain what she observed was that it was a small clump and a larger arc that was divided by 120 degrees. After additional examining the vision with computer models, Long discovered that the objects’ dimensions and locations matched the model for the presence of a planet.

“This arc and clump are separated by about 120 degrees,” she described. “That degree of separation doesn’t just happen– it’s important mathematically.”

However, the small, newborn planet can not yet be directly imaged because of technological restrictions. However, Long hopes future ALMA observations of LkCa 15 will offer additional proof supporting her planetary discovery.

If so, this might suggest that Long has found a revolutionary method to spot distant newborn planets that might forever alter how astronomers approach their hunt for celestial objects.

Meanwhile, Long hopes other astronomers will use her new approach to make more discoveries.

“I do hope this method can be widely adopted in the future,” she stated. “The only caveat is that this requires very deep data as the signal is weak.”

Originally published by: Interesting Engineering