Chilean astronomers lead key discovery on the formation of giant planets

The discovery was published today in The Astrophysical Journal, the data were obtained thanks to the ALMA radio telescope, located in the Atacama Desert.

The star Elias 2-27 is 378 million light years from Earth, around it there is a mass of gas and dust “this material will form planets, that is, it is a protoplanetary disk, its particularity is that it is very massive and gravitational instabilities occur in it,” explains Teresa Paneque, astronomer graduated from the Master of Science in Astronomy mention of the University of Chile and first author of the research.

“This phenomenon (gravitational instability) is an optimal mechanism to form giant planets (like Jupiter!), being widely studied in contemporary astronomy, but this is the first time that robust observational evidence is obtained that it is occurring. This achievement was something like ‘catching‘ the system ‘red-handed‘,” adds Paneque, who is currently a PhD student at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Garching, Germany.

The study of protoplanetary disks using the ALMA telescope allows us to infer the structure and dynamics of these objects. “Knowing these properties, we can understand more about the process of planetary formation. And in this study, we were able to observe for the first time several unusual characteristics: the gas is asymmetric and has perturbations in velocity near the spiral regions, the latter corresponding to theoretical predictions made for gravitational instabilities”, indicates Laura Pérez, academic of the Department of Astronomy FCFM of the University, researcher of the Center of Astrophysics CATA and scientific guide of Paneque, during this research. “So, studying a disk like this allows us to advance in the understanding of this different way of forming planets, of which there are few observations because it seems to be quite unusual”.