A protoplanet has been observed orbiting its star at 93 times the Earth-sun distance, providing evidence for a type of planet formation we have never seen before.
like Jupiter, with an orbit 5.2 times wider than Earth’s, are thought to have formed when solid particles in the disc collide and slowly snowball into a planet, in a process called core accretion.
Further away from the star, the disc isn’t dense enough for core accretion, so it is thought that giant planets with wider orbits must have formed in a different way, called gravitational instability. Because of the distance from the star, gas and dust cools and contracts into clumps that collapse under their own gravity to form the core of a planet.
AB Aur b is only the second protoplanet to have been directly imaged, and the youngest. The team hopes to gather more images at different wavelengths to better understand gas giant formation at its earliest stages. “Nature is very clever: it doesn’t produce facsimiles of the solar system; it produces a wide range of different planetary systems,” says Currie. “This is one of the more bizarre types of system.”
“This is a very exciting discovery that once again reminds us how little we actually know about the first stages of planetary formation and evolution,” saysat the Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands in Spain. “While this result still can’t say which is the dominant mechanism for the formation of planets, it shows that, at least at large orbital distances, disc instability seems to be possible.
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