Podcaster: Richard Drumm
Title: UNAWE Space Scoop – When Exactly Do We Celebrate Planet Birthdays?
Organization: 365 Days Of Astronomy
Link : http://365daysofastronomy.org/ ; https://spacescoop.org/en/scoops/2311/fast-and-furious-starring-dual-quasars/
Description: Space scoop, news for children.
Just how young can a proto-planetary disk be and be forming planets? Proto-planetary discs only exist for a few million years, which means that all planet formation in the system must take place within this, uh, narrow time frame.
But until now, astronomers have not been able to pinpoint how fast planets form in these discs. After years of study and observation of proto-planetary discs, astronomers found these discs have even deeper mysterious layers of structure within them.
Bio: Richard Drumm is President of the Charlottesville Astronomical Society and President of 3D – Drumm Digital Design, a video production company with clients such as Kodak, Xerox and GlaxoSmithKline Pharmaceuticals. He was an observer with the UVa Parallax Program at McCormick Observatory in 1981 & 1982. He has found that his greatest passion in life is public outreach astronomy and he pursues it at every opportunity.
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Transcript:
This is the 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast. Today we bring you a new episode in our Space Scoop series. This show is produced in collaboration with Universe Awareness, a program that strives to inspire every child with our wonderful cosmos.
Today’s story is…
When Exactly Do We Celebrate Planet Birthdays?
Baby planets form in proto-planetary discs around newborn stars.
These are disks of debris left over from the star’s formation.
You can think of them as cosmic leftovers.
Astronomers know that plenty of planets form in older proto-planetary discs.
But what about the younger discs?
Just how young can a proto-planetary disk be and be forming planets?
Proto-planetary discs only exist for a few million years, which means that all planet formation in the system must take place within this, uh, narrow time frame.
But until now, astronomers have not been able to pinpoint how fast planets form in these discs.
After years of study and observation of proto-planetary discs, astronomers found these discs have even deeper mysterious layers of structure within them.
This includes features like gaps and rings, which are important indicators of baby planets in the making.
In 2014 an image of the star HL Tauri in the constellation Taurus, clearly showed gaps in the ring of dust & debris where a planet or planets were forming.
It was an awe-inspiring image that actually made me gasp when I first saw it. Stunning!
Excited by these findings and even more curious, astronomers then began to explore a little deeper.
They set out to find at what stage of star formation do planets really form.
Using ALMA, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array of radio telescopes in Chile, an international team of 37 astronomers began to observe younger discs surrounding 17 protostars.
These protostars are located from 430 to 616 light-years away from Earth. Fairly close as galactic distances go.
To their surprise, the team saw that the younger discs were completely different from the more evolved, older proto-planetary discs.
Among the 17, only a few discs had planet-forming ring and gap structures.
Astronomers believe that these younger discs are just not very ready to produce planets yet.
According to the results, the astronomers estimate that planets begin to form from 100,000 years to a million years after star formation.
Hey, here’s a cool fact!
ALMA is a powerful telescope that can capture planet forming regions in great detail, by observing concentrations of small dust and gas particles, that were never possible to observe before.
The team’s analysis of these 17 protoplanetary systems will provide important constraints on the early stages of planetary formation.
You may rest assured that there will be more observations and more scientific papers in the near future!
So once we figure out when the planets are born, then we can celebrate their, uh, birthdays!
Thank you for listening to the 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast!
365 Days of Astronomy
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