Using the Subaru telescope, located at the top of the Mauna Kea volcano in Hawaii, and the space
The discovered planet, which was named AB Aurigae b,approximately nine times more massive than Jupiter and orbits its star at a distance of 13.6 billion km. This is about twice the distance from the Sun to Pluto.
The formation of the planet occurs in the protoplanetarya disk of dust and gas that has a spiral structure. Researchers believe that the system is about 2 million years old. Around this stage, the formation of planets in the solar system also took place.
Astrophysicists used new and archival datatelescopes "Subaru" and "Hubble" to confirm that this protoplanet is formed as a result of an intense process called disk instability.
protoplanetary disk. The bright central star is masked, its position indicated by an asterisk. Image: Thane Curry, Subaru Telescope
All planets are formed from materialconstituting a circumstellar (protoplanetary) disk. The dominant theory for the formation of gas giants like Jupiter is called the nuclear accretion or nuclear instability model. This hypothesis suggests that the planet is formed from small objects colliding and sticking together in orbit. When the stone core reaches a certain size, it begins to slowly collect gas from the protoplanetary disk.
The second, less popular hypothesis is the modeldisk instability - suggests that as the protoplanetary disk cools, it breaks up into one or more fragments of the planetary mass, which quickly forms the planet through the gravitational collapse of the surrounding matter.
According to scientists, it would take a lottime for the protoplanet AB Aurigae b to reach this size at this distance from the star if it formed according to the nuclear accretion model. Analysis of the nearest spiral structures in the protoplanetary disk, the researchers believe, shows that AB Aurigae b is formed as a result of the gravitational collapse of matter.
This study sheds new light on ourunderstanding the different ways planets form, says Thane Curry, one of the authors of the study, published in the journal Nature Astronomy. “Nature is smart, it can create planets in many ways.”
Scientists note that the discovery became possibleonly thanks to the large amount of data obtained by space and ground-based telescopes. The researchers used data from two Hubble instruments: the STIS and NICMOS spectrographs. The obtained data were compared with the SCExAO planetary imaging instrument of the Subaru telescope.
“This result is based on terrestrial and spaceobservations, and we can go back in time with Hubble archival observations,” said Olivier Guyon, co-author of the study. “The images of AB Aurigae b were obtained at different wavelengths, we have a consistent, very clear picture.”
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