Scientists Capture First Birth Of A Planet

An international team of scientists has discovered a young planet — just 5 or 6 million years old — forging its own path through space and likely growing along the way.

The scientists captured a photograph, which they say is the very first direct image of the birth of a planet still forming around a star.

It's a major finding for those of us on Earth, a 4.5-billion-year-old planet.

The newly discovered planet may be young, but it's huge: many times the size of Jupiter, which could fit 1,300 planet Earths inside.

The images provide useful information about how planets, including those in our own solar system, form.

A team of about 120 scientists worked on the research, published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

"It's a long-lasting and careful process," to characterize a young planet, says André Muller, who worked at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany. "We worked for at least a year on it on a daily basis."

The planet's name? PDS 70 b. That's based on the name of the star it orbits, PDS 70.

But the research team hasn't given the new planet a nickname — yet.

The photos released Monday were taken with the aptly named Very Large Telescope — a Chile-based facility that can combine imagery from four of the world's most advanced telescopes.

Scientists have theorized that planets form and grow in protoplanetary disks — collections of gas and dust surrounding a young star. This photo captured that process for the first time.

"Now we have proof that planetary objects [carve] a gap in the disk," Muller explains. "This is a very lucky case."

And the new planet was circling the star, albeit slowly. PDS 70 b makes a full orbit once about every 120 Earth years....