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APOD: 2025 August 27 Á WISPIT 2b: Exoplanet Carves Gap in Birth Disk
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Credit & Copyright: ESO,
VLT,
SPHERE;
Processing & Copyright: ESO, Richelle van Capelleveen (Leiden Obs.) et al.;
Text: Ogetay Kayali (MTU)
Explanation:
That yellow spot -- what is it?
It's a young
planet outside our Solar System.
The featured image from the
Very Large Telescope in
Chile surprisingly captures a distant scene much like our own Solar System's
birth, some 4.5 billion years ago.
Although we can't look into
the past
and see Earth's formation directly, telescopes
let us watch similar processes unfolding around distant stars.
At the center of this frame lies a young Sun-like star,
hidden behind a
coronagraph that blocks its bright glare.
Surrounding the star is a bright, dusty
protoplanetary disk -- the raw material of planets.
Gaps and concentric rings mark where a
newborn world is gathering gas and dust under its gravity,
clearing the way as it orbits the star.
Although astronomers
have imaged disk-embedded planets before,
this is the
first-ever observation of an exoplanet actively carving a gap within a disk
-- the
earliest direct glimpse of planetary sculpting in action.
Processing & Copyright: ESO, Richelle van Capelleveen (Leiden Obs.) et al.;
Text: Ogetay Kayali (MTU)
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Based on Astronomy Picture
Of the Day