[Washington, 4th Archyde.com]–International research teams such as Japan and the United States have succeeded in directly observing a protoplanet in the process of formation, which has a mass about four times that of Jupiter. It was published in the English scientific journal Nature Astronomy on the 4th.
Researchers used the Subaru Telescope (Hawaii, USA) and the Hubble Space Telescope to observe the young star “Auriga AB”, which is about 2 million years old and is about 500 light-years away. I caught the appearance of the protoplanet “AB Aur b” in the gas and dust surrounding the disk.
About 5,000 extrasolar planets have been discovered so far, but the one found this time is one of the largest.
According to researchers, the planet orbits 93 times the distance between the Earth and the Sun. It is thought that it was formed by self-gravity, rather than growing by collecting surrounding gases after the core grew like the giant planets of the solar system.