Groups of stars can tear their planet-forming disk into smaller pieces, leaving distorted, malformed rings, scientists can find in a breakthrough study.
Solar families like us Orbiting in the same, flat plane as their planets in general. But, as a team of international scientists found in a new study, this is not always the case.
11 years after studying GW Orionis, a young triple star system with an orbital disk 1,300 light-years away (a planet-forming, annular disk gas, dusty planets, Asteroids And many more), the team found the first direct evidence that groups of stars could actually tear their disks. This work reveals a disk that is not flat, but rather malformed and broken.
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“There have been many theoretical studies on the effects of disk tearing, but this is the first direct evidence of a disk forming a planet,” said Allison Young, co – author of the University of Exeter and the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom. In an email to Space.com. “This proves that it is possible for such disks to be deflected and broken and to raise the possibility of planets forming in more oblique orbits around multiple star systems.”
The distorted ring located inside the disk of the GW Orionis system contains 30 Earth-sized dust particles, the researchers found. This means there is enough material to create planets on the disk.
“This is the best way to create planets in orbit as intense as has ever been discovered,” Stephen Cross, professor of astronomy at the University of Exeter in the UK, told Space.com. GW Orionis. “But … from the planet-detection side, we still have no way to find these planets.”
Although researchers have not yet discovered planets within this system, underground research confirms what scientists have suspected for years: many star systems may break their disks, leaving misaligned, orbiting rings around its stars.
Beginning in 2008, researchers from the UK, Belgium, Chile, France and the United States studied three newborn stars in the GW Orionis system using amber (astronomical multi-beam combiner) and later European gravity instruments. Southern Laboratory Very large telescope (VLT) In Chile, it combines light from different telescopes.
“This data allowed us to create a comprehensive computer model of the system, which predicts that the contextual disk will bend and tear even to form a separate inner ring,” Young said.
“When the first orbital solution was found in 2016, we noticed this erroneous regulation between orbits,” Cross said, adding that theorists in the group predicted that the system could be vulnerable to disk tearing.
With this computer model in hand, the team then made observations with the SPHERE (Spectro-Polymetric High-Contrast Exoplanet Research) instrument and computer in the VLT. Atacama Large Millimeter / Submillimeter Range (Alma), the world’s largest radio telescope.
“When we got the data from VLT and Alma, the pictures were stunning. We saw this ring clearly in Alma’s observations and in the shadow of the story that VLT tells in the film, they can only be played by the oblique loop,” Young said.
The results confirmed the incorrect design of the ring and showed that what they suspected was happening 1,300 light-years away.
“I’m very excited to see the mathematical predictions being verified so clearly in the observations. I’m very surprised to see the spherical image because we can actually see that the disk is a 3 dimensional structure, which is covered in surface bumps and shadows,” Young said. “We are seeing that in the process of creation it may eventually turn into an unusual type of planetary system.”
This works Released today (September 3) In the journal Science.
Email Chelsea Cohd at [email protected] or follow her on Twitter chelsea_gohd. Follow us on Twitter pSpacedotcom and Facebook
