Planet-forming discs in three clouds of the Milky Way

This research brings together observations of more than 80 young stars that might have planets forming around them in spectacular discs. This small selection from the survey shows 10 discs from the three regions of our galaxy observed in the papers. V351 Ori and V1012 Ori are located in the most distant of the three regions, the gas-rich cloud of Orion, some 1600 light-years from Earth. DG Tau, T Tau, HP Tau, MWC758 and GM Aur are located in the Taurus region, while HD 97048, WW Cha and SZ Cha can be found in Chamaeleon I, all of which are about 600 light-years from Earth.

The images shown here were captured using the Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast Exoplanet REsearch (SPHERE) instrument mounted on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT). SPHERE’s state-of-the-art extreme adaptive optics system corrects for the turbulent effects of Earth’s atmosphere, yielding crisp images of the discs around stars. The stars themselves have been covered with a coronagraph — a circular mask that blocks their intense glare, revealing the faint discs around them.

The discs have been scaled to appear roughly the same size in this composition.

Crediti:

ESO/C. Ginski, A. Garufi, P.-G. Valegård et al.

A proposito dell'immagine

Identificazione:eso2405a
Tipo:Collage
Data di pubblicazione:Martedì 05 Marzo 2024 14:00
Notizie relative:eso2405
Dimensione:3005 x 1230 px

A proposito delll'oggetto

Tipo:Milky Way : Star : Circumstellar Material : Disk : Protoplanetary
Categoria:Exoplanets

Formati delle immagini

JPEG grande
1,1 MB

Zoom