EUROPE: A team of researchers from the University of Arizona said they have been successful in capturing images of forming planets. They said this is the first time when anything like this has been captured directly.
Researchers in the study published Wednesday in the journal Nature detailed that they are very lucky that they got an opportunity to witness the planet formation. They also hope that their discovery can provide scientists with new insights on how planets actually form and how they are actually in their formative years.
As per experts, so far almost 1,900 planets have been found in orbit around distant stars, but all those stars were grown up or mature stars. These mature planets are detected when they pass in front of the stars they orbit, which make their light dim.
As per study scientists, the infant or young stars are very small and volatile, therefore in order to view them directly they pointed their powerful telescopes toward young stars. They focus on the empty space around the stars, which they called the disk cavity.
Then in 2011 researchers finally found a possible protoplanet in the area around LkCa 15. It was a star which was estimated to be around 2 million years old and was almost 1,000 times less bright than LkCa 15.
The study lead author Stephanie Sallum, a graduate student at the University of Arizona used a technique called non-redundant masking (NRM) to get high-resolution images of the region surrounding the young star.
