Rare Birth of Baby Jupiter Offers New Theory About Formation of a Planetary System

Two Australian scientists collaborating with an international team have observed images of a "Jupiter-like gas giant" forming 500 light-years from Earth.

Professor Peter Tuthill of the University of Sydney (USYD) and research fellow Barnaby Norris think finding a young gas giant might help address long-standing issues regarding the creation of planets.

They published their study, "Images of Embedded Jovian Planet Formation at a Wide Separation Around Ab Aurigae," in Nature Astronomy journal.

Researchers Find Birth of Baby Jupiter

In The Conversation on Tuesday, the researchers wrote that the rare baby Jupiter photos revealed a luminous creation trapped inside a dense, whirling halo of dust and gas beyond the solar system, which they calculated to be as hot as 2,000 degrees Celsius.

Observations from the Subaru Telescope in Hawaii and the Hubble Space Telescope were used to get their conclusions.

The unexpected discovery contradicts the long-held theory of "core accretion," which explains how huge gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn formed.

According to this idea, planets were formed as dust grains clumped together to form successively larger grains, pebbles, and boulders, eventually forming a "cascade" of baby planets or "planetesimals" near "host" stars.

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However, astronomers have recently discovered that certain old planets do not follow this process because they orbit too far away from their host stars to have "run the business of planet construction," as Tuthill and Norris put it.

Adding to the enigma, scientists were unable to determine how such planets were formed, despite being billions of years old.

However, the newest planet, AB Aurigae, also far from its host star, does not have this age problem. The planet is around 93 times further distant from AB Aurigae than the Earth is from the Sun.

The new study offers us a new clue into how planetary systems are formed. It suggests that the stellar systems from away from us do not necessary follow the conventional rules.

"There's more than one way to cook an egg,"  said Thayne Currie of the Subaru Telescope and the NASA-Ames Research Center, lead author of the study.

Exoplanet AB Aurigae b Growing Unconventionally

According to EarthSky, this planet, known as AB Aurigae b, is growing in an "unconventional method." Why is it so unusual? Gas giant planets like Jupiter are theorized to originate through core accretion for a long time. Tiny particles of material, ranging from dust to boulders, impact and bind together in this process. It creates a center core, or protoplanet, which collects more material like dust and gas.

On the other hand, disk instability causes the planet to form directly from the protoplanetary disk that orbits the star. When the disk cools, it splits up into smaller planetary-mass fragments, which continue to gather material.

Understanding Development of Jupiter-Like Planets

Futurity said understanding the early stages of the development of Jupiter-like planets gives scientists a better understanding of our own solar system's past. This discovery lays the path for more research into the chemical composition of protoplanetary disks like AB Aurigae in the future, including using NASA's James Webb Space Telescope.

The National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, which is part of Japan's National Institutes of Natural Sciences, operates the 8.2-meter Subaru Telescope with assistance from the MEXT Project to Promote Large Scientific Frontiers. The crew is honored and appreciative of the chance to study the universe from Maunakea, a culturally, historically, and naturally significant Hawaiian mountain.

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