Researchers Capture First Photo of a Planet in Making - Video

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An international team of scientists in Australia and the United States has captured the first-ever images of a planet in the making. The accumulation of dust and gas particles onto a new planet – the process by which the planet continues to form and grow – has been directly observed for the first time.

None of the nearly 1,900 planets previously discovered and confirmed outside our Solar System (called exoplanets) are in the process of formation.

There are 450 light-years between Earth and LkCa15, a young star with a transition disk around it, a cosmic whirling dervish, a birthplace for planets.

Despite the disk’s considerable distance from Earth and its gaseous, dusty atmosphere, University of Arizona researchers captured the first photo of a planet in the making, a planet residing in a gap in LkCa15′s disk.

Image shows a composite where blue represents the MagAO data taken at H-alpha, and green and red show the LBT data taken at Ks and L’ bands. The greyscale is a previously published millimeter image of the disk.

Photo credit: Stephanie Sallum

Of the roughly 2,000 known exoplanets — planets that orbit a star other than our sun — only about 10 have been imaged, and that was long after they had formed, not when they were in the making.

“This is the first time that we’ve imaged a planet that we can say is still forming,” says Steph Sallum, a UA graduate student, who with Kate Follette, a former UA graduate student now doing postdoctoral work at Stanford University, led the research.

The researchers’ results were published in the Nov. 19 issue of Nature.

Only months ago, Sallum and Follette were working independently, each on her own Ph.D. project. But serendipitously they had set their sights on the same star. Both were observing LkCa15, which is surrounded by a special kind of protoplanetary disk that contains an inner clearing, or gap.

Protoplanetary disks form around young stars using the debris left over from the star’s formation. It is suspected that planets then form inside the disk, sweeping up dust and debris as the material falls onto the planets instead of staying in the disk or falling onto the star. A gap is then cleared in which planets can reside.

Animation created by Andrew Shuta (University of Arizona) and was conceptualized by Laird Close (University of Arizona; disk and planet illustration modified from NASA/JPL-Caltech image; white disk VLA image from Andrea Isella (Rice University); all other LkCa15 images from the Magellan and LBT telescopes. See Sallum, et. al. Nature 2015 for details.

Video courtesy of the University of Arizona