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Revolutionary New View of Baby Planets Forming Around a Star
astroengine writes Welcome to HL Tauri — a star system that is just being born and the target of one of the most mind-blowing astronomical observations ever made. Observed by the powerful Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile, this is the most detailed view of the proto-planetary disk surrounding a young star 450 light-years away. And those concentric rings cutting through the glowing gas and dust? Those, my friends, are tracks etched out by planets being spawned inside the disk. In short, this is the mother of all embryonic star system ultrasounds. But this dazzling new observation is so much more — it's a portal into our solar system's past, showing us what our system of planets around a young sun may have looked like over 4 billion years ago. And this is awesome, because it proves that our theoretical understanding about the evolution of planetary systems is correct. However, there are some surprises. "When we first saw this image we were astounded at the spectacular level of detail," said Catherine Vlahakis, ALMA Deputy Program Scientist. "HL Tauri is no more than a million years old, yet already its disc appears to be full of forming planets. This one image alone will revolutionize theories of planet formation."
When you can go to the source?
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
I've always wondered who does the "Artist's impression of" things for NASA and various other agencies. Do they just employ some CG artists full time and they're basically on-call to whip something up so they can actually publish one of these articles? How accurate are they or are just going for visual impact instead of real fidelity?
That's a great question. And might even be useful if it applied in this case.
The Atacam Large Milimeter/submilimeter Array (ALMA) is the source for the photos of the HL Tauri system, some 450 light years away.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
At the bottom of the article is "Artist's impression of the HL Tauri protoplanetary disk." This is in addition to the image from the actual ALMA observatory.
Calling Blinn a first rate computer animator is a bit of an understatement,
The dude invented half of the algorithms CG uses today.
Although the star is much smaller than the Sun, the disc around HL Tauri stretches out to almost three times as far from the star as Neptune is from the Sun.
That's the caption on an approximate side-by-side comparison image. Neptune is 30.1 AU, so, 80 AU or so? In the image, the disk looks closer to two times the size, but I'm going with the words.