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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."
I bet I'm not the only one who'd be chuffed if Jim Blinn did a Slashdot interview.
And yet, if you think on it from a "space colonization strategy game" perspective, we're investing just 1:100000 of our gross world product on the new technology that might let us find the location of our first extra solar colony.
Or, in other words, I defend it's arguably one of the very few things on which it's worth spending money (from an inhumanly objective point of view).