Stars in the early stages of their lives are surrounded by flat disks of dust and gas, spinning slowly around them. Over time, this material clumps together to form planets, or eventually gets blown away by the stellar wind. This process can take millions of years, so astronomers don’t have a way to watch it from start to finish. But by imaging the disks around many of these young stars, astronomers hope to get a snapshot view of the various stages of planet formation.
Now, by studying TW Hydrae, a young star located less than 200 light-years from Earth, astronomers think they’ve found a planet in the very earliest stages of its life. It’s marked by a large, diffuse blob of gas orbiting at the edge of the otherwise well-ordered disk of material. Researchers led by Takashi Tsukagoshi from the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan reported their observations June 6 ...
