GALLERY VIEW – 3 IMAGES Throughout its operation, Hubble periodically looks at the protoplanet AB Aurigae b located in a young solar system 530 light-years away from Earth. At the center of this solar system is the star AB Aurigae which is only two million years old. Hubble observed the shape of the baby planet around its local star and found that it closely resembled Jupiter, but is actually nine times larger than Jupiter and orbits its star at twice the distance between Pluto and of our Sun (8.6 billion miles). Now, why is this interesting? Gas giants are usually formed by a process called the “augmentation nucleus”, which is the process of building a planet from the accumulation of smaller pieces of rock, ice, dust and pebbles that combine together for millions of years to form a planet. At the distance that AB Aurigae b orbits its star, the researchers believe it is unlikely to form through the accumulation of the nucleus, which led them to observe the baby planet with many different telescopes for an extended period of time to find an answer. The results were published in the journal Nature Astronomy, and according to lead author Thayne Currie, the accumulation of data from multiple telescopes led to the conclusion that AB Aurigae b was formed through a process called “disk instability”. “Almost all of the ~ 5000 known indirectly detected exoplanets orbit their host stars at solar system scales (a In contrast, exoplanets depicted directly usually have wide orbits of 50-300 au and have more than ~ 5 times the mass of Jupiter. “The conditions of the disk may not allow the on-site formation for many of these planets with nucleus accumulation,” the newspaper explains. “A reasonable alternative model is disk instability: a violent and rapid gravitational collapse process that is best suited for the formation of supergiant gas planets at au 100 au. Finally, this discovery has profound implications for our understanding of how they are formed. The planets. AB Aur b provides a basic direct look at the protoplanets in the built-in stage. “ “Thus, it investigates an earlier stage of planet formation from the PDS 70 system. AB Aur’s protoplanetary disk shows multiple spiral arms, and AB Aur b appears as a spatially separated cluster located near these arms,” the authors write. For more information on this story, see this link here.
