Stars are born surrounded by a rotating disk of gas and dust called protoplanetary accretion disk, and these spinning, gaseous rings around baby stars harbor the necessary ingredients from which a family of planets is formed. Astronomers have observed several such protoplanetary accretion disks circling distant, bright, fiery baby stars, and these disks take shape at about the same time as the baby star, called protostar–is born within its natal cloud that darkens and veils. In May 2015, an international team of astronomers announced the discovery of a very young, distant planetary system that may help astronomers understand how our own Solar System came to be and evolved some 4.56 billion years ago. A ring of planetary debris, surrounding the young parent star inhabiting this system, reveals an eerie and remarkable resemblance to the solar system itself. Kuiper belt which is situated beyond the outermost major planet, Neptune.
The astronomers who discovered the remote disk used the Gemini Planet Imager (GPI) in it Gemini North telescope in Chile, to identify a bright disk-shaped ring of dust surrounding a distant star that is only slightly more massive than our own star, the Sun. The dazzling disk lies between 37 and 55 Astronomical Units (AU)–or 3.4 to 5.1 billion miles–from its parent star. This corresponds to approximately the same distance that separates our Solar System Kuiper belt of our Sun. One IN is equal to the average distance between the Earth and the Sun, which is about 93,000,000 miles. The alluring disk’s mesmerizing glow is the result of brilliant starlight reflected from it, and is also consistent with a wide range of dust compositions, including ice and silicates that inhabit our planet. Kuiper belt.
Our Kuiper belt It is located at the outer limits of our Sun’s family, just beyond Neptune, and is home to thousands of small icy objects that are relics left over from the formation of our Solar System more than four billion years ago. These icy objects range in size from dusty specks of debris to moon-sized icy bodies like the dwarf planet Pluto.
Protoplanetary accretion disks contain vast amounts of nutritious gas and dust that feed the hungry, growing ones. protoplanets Our own Solar System, as well as other planetary systems, are formed when a relatively small and very dense blob embedded within the billowing waves of a dark, cold giant molecular cloud gravitationally collapses under its own awesome weight. The strange, dark cradles of bright stars, these frigid, ghostly clouds haunt our galaxy in large numbers and are composed mostly of gas, but also contain smaller amounts of dust. Most of the collapsing gaseous and dusty mass accumulates in the center and eventually ignites furiously as a result of the process of nuclear fusion–giving birth to a fabulous new stellar baby (the protostar). What remains of the gas and dust, which went into the formation of the protostar, eventually evolves into the protoplanetary accretion disk from which planets, moons, asteroids, and comets emerge. In their early stages, accretion disks are very hot and very massive, and can encircle their young stars for ten million years.
By the time a fiery Sun-like stellar baby has reached what is called the Tauri stage in its development, the massive, searing surround drive has gotten much thinner and cooler. IN Tauri it is a stellar child: a young, variable star like our Sun that is highly active at the tender age of just 10 million years. These tiny stellates have large diameters several times larger than our Sun today, but they are still in the process of shrinking, because young Sun-like stars shrink as they grow. By the time the fiery child has reached this stage in its development, less volatile materials have begun to condense near the center of the surrounding disk, forming very fine and extremely sticky dust particles. The brittle and delicate specks of dust contain crystalline silicates.
The small, sticky dust grains collide with each other and then coalesce in the dense environment of the protoplanetary accretion disk. In this way, larger and larger objects continually grow, from the size of a pebble to the size of a rock, to the size of a mountain, to the size of the moon, to the size of a planet. These growing objects evolve into what is called planetesimals–the primordial planetary building blocks. planetesimals they can reach sizes 1 kilometer across, or even larger, and are a very abundant population within a young accretion disk surrounding the fiery stellar baby. They can also hang around long enough that some of them are still around billions of years after a mature planetary system has formed. In our Solar System, asteroids are the rocky and metallic remnant planetesimals those were the fundamental building blocks of the four rocky inner planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars. On the other hand, comets are here the remains of the planetesimals which entered into the construction of the quartet of outer gas planets: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.
the Kuiper belt
Tea Kuiper belt it was named after the Dutch-American astronomer Gerard Kuiper (1905-1973), who is commonly credited with being the first to predict its existence. It is a region of our Solar System beyond the mysterious, dark, and frigid realm of the majestic outer planets, stretching from the orbit of Neptune (at 30 AU) to about 50 AU from our Star. In many ways it is similar to the handheld asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, but has a mass 20 to 200 times greater. the distant Kuiper Belt, As the hand asteroid belt, consists of small bodies–planetesimals–which are remnants of the formation of our Solar System. A large number of asteroids are composed primarily of rock and metal, but most Kuiper belt Objects (KBO) they are made of volatiles (called “ices”), such as water, methane, and ammonia. Tea Kuiper belt is the icy home of a trio of officially recognized Tiny planets: Pluto, Haumea and Makemake. A handful of moons in our Solar System, such as Neptune’s Triton and Saturn’s Phoebe, are also often thought to have originated in this distant region.
From the Kuiper belt was discovered in 1992, the number of known KBO has skyrocketed to over a thousand, and over 100,000 KBO More than 62 miles in diameter are believed to exist in the distant iciness of our Solar System. At first, astronomers believed that the Kuiper belt was the main domain of periodic comets–those with orbits lasting less than 200 years. However, more recent studies since the mid-1990s have shown that the Kuiper belt is dynamically stable, and that the true place of origin of comets is the scattered disc. Tea scattered disc it is a dynamically active region formed by the outward migration of Neptune 4.5 billion years ago, when our Solar System was still in its infancy. scattered disc objects such as eris they sport extremely eccentric (out-of-round) orbits that take them within 100 AU of our dazzling star.
The objects that revolve inside the Kuiper Belt, along with the frozen inhabitants of the scattered disc and oort cloudare collectively called transneptunian objects. the very remote oort cloud It is a thousand times further than the Kuiper belt and not so flat. It is also the repository of long period comets (those with orbits lasting more than 200 years), and it’s a gigantic layer of icy objects around our entire Solar System, stretching halfway to the nearest star beyond our Sun!
Poor Pluto is the largest inhabitant of the Kuiper beltas well as the second largest known transneptunian object–the greatest being eris who dances inside scattered disc. Although originally classified as a major planet after its discovery in 1930, Pluto’s status as a member of the Kuiper belt caused him to be unceremoniously evicted from the pantheon of major planets, and reclassified as a dwarf planet in 2006. Poor Pluto is compositionally similar to many other KBOand its orbital period is characteristic of a class of KBO called plutinos. Plutinos shares the same 2:3 resonance with Neptune.
In a solar system far, far away!
The star of the new study, carried out by the team of international astronomers, is a bright member of the very massive 10 to 20 million year old. Scorpio-Centaurs OB association, which is a region very similar to the one in which our Sun was born. The main distinguishing characteristic of the members of a stellar association is that most of them share similar characteristics. Year external transmission association hosts a large number of scorching, turbulent and fiery blue giant stars, of spectral classes EITHER and b.
The bright disk-shaped dust ring seen in this study is not perfectly centered on the star. This is a powerful indication that the ring was likely carved by one or more unseen distant alien planets. Using models that illustrate how planets carve disks of debris, the astronomers found that “eccentric” versions of giant planets in the outer realm of the solar system could explain the observed properties of the bright ring.
“It’s almost like looking at the outer Solar System when you were a little kid,” Dr. Thayne Currie commented in May 2015. University of Cambridge Press release. Dr. Currie is the principal investigator of this research and an astronomer at the subaru observatory in Hawaii. The University of Cambridge is in the UK.
Tea Kuiper belt it is commonly thought to be composed of the remnants of the ancient formation of our Solar System, so there is a possibility that once the new system is developed, it may bear a striking resemblance to our own Solar System’s appearance today.
“Being able to directly image planetary birth environments around other stars at orbital distances comparable to the Solar System is a breakthrough. Our discovery of a near-twin of the Kuiper belt provides direct evidence that the Solar System’s planetary birth environment may not be uncommon,” explained Dr. Nikku Madhusudhan in May 2015. Press release from the University of Cambridge. Dr Madhusudhan is from Cambridge institute of astronomy, and one of the co-authors of the article.
The parent star of this system, known as HD115600, was the first object the research team observed. “Over the next few years, I am optimistic that the GPI it will reveal many more debris disks and young planets. Who knows what strange new worlds we will find,” Dr. Currie told reporters.
The new research will be published in The letters of the astrophysical journal.
