Member-only story
The trouble in trying to make a planet
One of the things we talk about is planet formation. Or, more importantly, how we really don’t understand planetary formation. Part of the problem is, we only had one example of a solar system for the nearly 400 years between when Galileo started making scientific observations and when 51 Peg was discovered to have a planet in 1995. Four-hundred years is a lot of years during which theorists could theorize about how to create solar systems just like our own. In the years since extrasolar planets were discovered, people have flailed about trying to explain the great diversity of solar systems we are now finding. Along the way, lots of contradictory ideas have been put forward. Part of the problem is we don’t have a lot of data to describe the in between steps in solar system formation. We see the big picture of star forming regions becoming star clusters. We see the proplyd step, where baby solar systems are cocooned in gas and dust. With radio telescopes we have started to see disks with what we think are forming planets. With missions like Kepler, we see fully formed solar systems in every possible configuration. What we haven’t had are observations of the intermediate step between proplyd and planetary disk. At least we haven’t had them until now.
A team of observers using the Very Large Array and the Atacama Large Millimeter Array have now observed more than 300 baby planet…
