Researchers used the Subaru Telescope in Hawaii and the Hubble Space Telescope to find and study the planet. It is a gas giant orbiting an unusually distant young star. Gas giants are planets like Jupiter and Saturn in our solar system. They consist of hydrogen and helium. These gases surround a smaller solid nucleus, the innermost part of a planet. “We believe it is still too early to give birth,” said astrophysicist Thayne Currie of the Subaru Telescope and NASA-Ames Research Center. He is the lead author of a study recently published in the journal Nature Astronomy. “Evidence shows that this is the earliest stage of formation ever observed for a gas giant,” he added. The planet is surrounded by a star called AB Aurigae, about 9.5 trillion kilometers from Earth. An image of the star appeared in the 2021 movie “Don’t Look Up”. About 5,000 planets, or extraterrestrials, have been identified beyond our solar system. This one, called AB Aur b, is one of the largest. Planets in the process of formation – called protoplanets – have been observed around just one other star. Almost all known exoplanets have orbits around their stars within the distance that separates our sun and its most distant planet, Poseidon. But this planet orbits three times farther from Poseidon than the sun and 93 times the distance of the Earth from the sun. Its formation seems to follow a different process from the way planets usually form. Olivier Guyon is an astronomer with the Subaru Telescope and the University of Arizona. He is the co-author of the study on the planet. Guyon said the common thinking is that most planets are formed by the slow growth of solids in a rocky core. He noted that the gas giants go through this process before the solid core becomes large enough to start the gas layer. In this state, protoplanets in the area surrounding a young star slowly grow from dust into large solid rock-sized objects. If this nucleus reaches the Earth’s mass many times, they begin to collect gas from the surrounding dust and gas. “This process cannot form giant planets at great orbital distances, so this discovery calls into question our understanding of planet formation,” Guyon said. Researchers believe that AB Aur b is formed in a state in which the area around the star cools. Gravity then causes it to split into one or more huge masses that form on planets. The star AB Aurigae is about 2.4 times larger than our sun and almost 60 times brighter. It is about 2 million years old – very young compared to our 4.5 billion year old sun. “New astronomical observations are constantly challenging our current theories, ultimately improving our understanding of the universe,” Guyon said. He added that “the formation of the planet is very complicated and messy, with many surprises still ahead.” My name is Jonathan Evans. Will Dunham reported this story to Reuters. Jonathan Evans adapted this story for learning English.
Words in this story
layer – v. to form or arrange a thickness from one thing on another challenge – n. a difficult task or problem messy – adj. not clean or tidy
