New observations of a young star and its surroundings are like a snapshot of our own solar system when it was forming, astronomers announced Friday.
The star, just a million years old, is surrounded by a disk of dust, the sort of "protoplanetary" disk from which planets formed around our Sun, according to theory. In the disk is a gap that astronomers say likely was formed by one or more giant gas planets, something similar to Jupiter and the other planets we're familiar with.
"GM Aurigae is essentially a much younger version of our Sun, and the gap in its disk is about the same size as the space occupied by our own giant planets," said Dan Watson, professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Rochester. "Looking at it is like looking at baby pictures of our Sun and outer solar system."
The observations were made with NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope.
An alternative theory goes like this: Rocky planets form in the conventional way, but gas giants don't. Instead, they collapse, over a few thousand years, out of a knot in the ring of gas and dust.
"The results pose a challenge to existing theories of giant-planet formation, especially those in which planets build up gradually over millions of years," said Nuria Calvet, professor of astronomy at the University of Michigan and lead author of a paper on the results in the Sept. 10 issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters. "Studies like this one will ultimately help us better understand how our outer planets, as well as others in the universe, form."
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