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Astronomers capture image of new baby planet

The baby planet is seen as the bright spot to the right of the black dot, its host star.

The baby planet is seen as the bright spot to the right of the black dot, its host star. Photo: ESO

Astronomers say they have captured the first confirmed image of a planet forming in the dust swirling around a young star.

Scientists said the planet appears as a bright spot in the snapshot taken using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile.

The planet has been named PDS 70b, after it was located about 3 billion kilometres from its host star, PDS 70. It appears as a gas giant with a larger mass than Jupiter.

The stunning photo show the newly forming planet as the bright spot to the right of a black dot that is the young dwarf star it is forming around.

The image was captured by the SPHERE instrument on the ESO’s Very Large Telescope and uses a filter, known as a coronagraph. It is considered the first clear detection of a separate baby planet.

The coronagraph blocks the light from the central star and allows the detection of the fainter disc and potential neighbouring planets.

“These discs around young stars are the birthplaces of planets, but so far only a handful of observations have detected hints of baby planets in them,” Miriam Kepler of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany said.

The star is 370 light-years from Earth – roughly equivalent to the distance between Uranus and our sun.

Researchers say the planet also has a cloudy atmosphere and a surface temperature of 1000C.

“After more than a decade of enormous efforts to build this high-tech machine, now SPHERE enables us to reap the harvest with the discovery of baby planets,” Max Planck Institute for Astronomy director Thomas Henning said.

Ms Kepler said hints of baby planets had been detected before, but astronomers were not sure whether those observations might simply be features in the swirling dust.

Documentation on the baby planet was published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics on Monday.

Astronomers are still trying to understand the process of how a planet is formed.

-with agencies

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