As we know all planets in our solar system have born from a dusty disk surrounding the sun billions of years ago, so wouldn't it be exciting to see another star system going through the phase of producing exoplanets!
Today, using the power of the twin 10 meter Keck telescope at Hawaii, a team of astronomers have clarified just that.
A baby world have been imaged directly for the 1st time forming close to an parent star inside an empty track over a larger disk of dust. And this is an record; this is the youngest exoplanet in the universe, even 5 times younger than discovered till date.
The baby world LkCa 15 b
This baby world is named LkCa 15 b- this T Tauri star located 450 light years from Earth's orbit.
The T Tauri stars are very luminous and variable stars.They have formed a cloud of gas under gravitational collapse in the recent astronomical timescales.The gravitational energy is the thing that provides energy to power the star in a stage before nuclear fusion stars in their cores.
So, when we look at the LkCa 15 b, we just look out at a star in its very early stages .
Kraus and co-investigator Michael Ireland using a clever trick were able to tease out the light being emitted by the dust surrounding the newborn star.With combined power of Keck’s adaptive optics and a brilliant technique called adaptive mask interferometry, they manipulated the starlight after it was received by he telescope.
Kraus and Ireland intend to investigate other nearby stars to observe whether similar worlds are forming or not in the ultimate hope of understanding the planetary formation processes that built our own solar system.
(source: space.com)
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