This Might Be How Jupiters Form
Researchers have finally observed what they believe are the very first stages of planetary formation via gravitational instability.
Gravitational instability is one of two major ways we think planets come to be, but observational evidence has been extremely hard to come by.
Thanks to two massive ground-based telescopes, scientists were able to see into the structure of the spiral arms of a young star, and observe pre-planet clumps of debris coming into being for the first time.
A lot had to happen for our Solar System to come into being. A star had to ignite, the right elements had to be collected, and planets had to form. The method behind that last aspect remains one of the most-studied mysteries in astronomy. We know that planets formed, but we don’t necessarily know how.
Now, that’s not to say we don’t have theories, and solid ones. We’re pretty sure that planets form in one of two ways. There’s core accretion, which is when the biggest piece of tiny debris in an area gravitationally attracts more and more debris until a planet has been formed.
And then there’s gravitational instability, which is when a blob of debris kind of separates off from the rest of a cloud and eventually gains enough internal gravity that the whole thing just collapses to form the core of a new planet.
For a very long time, though researchers had solid models to predict planetary formation from gravitational instability, there wasn’t much observational data to back it up. But recently, that may have changed. According to a recent study published in the Astrophysical Journal, researchers may have finally caught the beginnings of the gravitational instability planetary formation process in action.
“This discovery is truly captivating as it marks the very first detection of clumps around a young star that have the potential to give rise to giant planets,” Alice Zurlo, one of the researchers on the study, said in a press release.
“No one had ever seen a real observation of gravitational instability happening at planetary scales—until now,” Philipp Weber, lead researcher on the study, added.
The researchers made use of the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Very Large Telescope (VLT) and the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) to take an incredible new image of a star called V960 Mon. The star—which first grabbed astronomers’ attention in 2014 when it suddenly spiked in brightness by over 20 times—is located about 5,000 light years away from Earth and is surrounded by spiraling arms of dust, gas, and debris that stretch wider than our entire Solar System.
In the new image of V960 Mon, researchers could see that those long, spiraling arms were not only present, but fragmenting. Specifically, using ALMA, they were able to peer into the structure of these arms and see that the fragments were about the masses of planets. If they were to become gravitationally unstable tomorrow and collapse in on themselves, they could form planets just as predicted.
Obviously, this is a very new detection, and will need follow-up observations to confirm and probe more deeply into the process. Once its construction is complete, researchers hope to use the ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) to further probe the system in a level of detail that was simply impossible before.
But as they wait for the construction to finish, the team is taking a moment to be excited about the amazing thing they’ve already spotted. “Our group has been searching for signs of how planets form for over ten years,” Sebastián Pérez, one of the researchers on the project, said in a press release. “And we couldn't be more thrilled about this incredible discovery.”
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