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Revolutionary New View of Baby Planets Forming Around a Star

Posted by samzenpus on from the would-you-look-at-that dept.

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."

5 of 91 comments (clear)

  1. I'm gona ask the hard questions here... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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?

    1. Re:I'm gona ask the hard questions here... by NixieBunny · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I met one of the guys who did this work at JPL, Jim Blinn, 30 years ago. He was quite a knowledgeable astronomy guy in addition to being a first-rate computer animator.

      --
      The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.
  2. Ring Spacing Reason? by BoRegardless · · Score: 4, Interesting

    What is most interesting is the nearly equal radial spacing of the half dozen most distinct rings.

    That begs the question, why?

  3. This image cost a billion dollars by NixieBunny · · Score: 5, Interesting
    This image is the result of a 25 year project to build a big interferometric array of millimeter-wave radio telescopes in Chile. The ALMA array is a mind-bogglingly complex system of 60+ telescopes, a correlator to combine all the signals, some bleeding-edge technology to maintain phase coherence of gigahertz signals traveling over many kilometers of optical fibers, and a bunch of other feats of engineering. I am awed by the results, and amazed that it was possible to get the whole thing to work.

    I'm privileged to get to work on a prototype antenna for this project, which was just installed on Kitt Peak and commissioned today.

    --
    The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.
    1. Re:This image cost a billion dollars by mmell · · Score: 4, Interesting
      HL Tauri is roughly 450ly from Sol - not clear across the galaxy, but not exactly right next door either. I wonder if this array could image extrasolar planetary bodies? It's one thing to image an accretion disk (which is more than a few AU's in size), but the image I saw makes me think this thing might just be able to resolve planets.

      Either way, this array was definitely money well spent.