The technology has enabled increasingly planets outside, very different solar system are discovered each other, and their study is key to understanding the origin of our own. Now, scientists have observed for the first time a protoplanetary disk miniature germ gestation planets.
Stars form in clouds of gas and dust that collapse under gravity and around them over time, dust particles will adhere to each other generating sand, stones and rocks that will eventually settle into a thin disk protoplanetary where then asteroids, comets and planets form.
These are flattened disks of gas and dust structures surrounding very young stars.
In 2014, thanks to 42 antennas of the ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter / Submillimeter Array, installed in the Atacama Desert, Chile), the researchers obtained the sharpest image from one of these disks around the star HL Tau, located 450 light years from Earth.
This, they succeeded in capturing the best shots to date of a protoplanetary disk.
In this new study, published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, scientists, led by the Spanish Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia (IAA) have been fixed in another protoplanetary disk, but this time a disc in miniature, in which they are brewing planets will orbit very close to its star.
The discovery was a surprise, he told Efe Mayra Osorio, the IAA: "on observations of 2014 the entire astronomical community noticed the star HL Tau, but next was another young star, the XZ Tau B, which have analyzed for this job".