14 DAY TRIAL // A new star is now forming some 325 light-years from us. About a thousand times younger than our Sun, which has been around for nearly 4.6 billion years, the baby fiery orb is surrounded by rotating gas and dust.
In a report in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, University of Leeds astronomers describe this extra material as being arranged in a so-called protoplanetary disk.
Thus, they say that, in time, the gas and the dust circling the emerging star, dubbed HD 100546, will likely coalesce to form planets. In fact, this is precisely how our very own Solar System came into being ages ago.
“HD 100546 is a young star (only a thousandth of the age of the Sun) surrounded by a disk-shaped structure of gas and dust, called a ‘proto-planetary disk,’ in which planets can form,” the researchers explain their find.
There is something odd about this emerging system
To get a better idea of what exactly is happening in this corner of the cosmos, the University of Leeds astronomers pointed the Very Large Telescope Interferometer in Chile at young HD 100546 and its surroundings.
They found that, while it is true that protoplanetary disks are found around pretty much all forming stars, the one encompassing HD 100546 is a rather odd appearance.
For starters, it spans across about a dozen times the distance between the Sun and Pluto. Besides, it has a gap in it. This gap, evidence of at least one planet still in its early stages of formation, cuts the disk into two regions.
“The disk exhibits a gap that is devoid of material. This gap is very large, about ten times the size of the space that separates the Sun from the Earth,” says astronomer Ignacio Mendigutía.
Normally, the inner disk of gas should have been destroyed by its sheer proximity to HD 100546 by now. Scientists suspect that it still exists because the forming planet in the gap is siphoning material from the outer gas and fueling it, as shown in the illustration below.
