Astronomers find a giant exoplanet hiding in the 'fog' around a young star angielski

Astronomers have detected a giant exoplanet—between three and ten times the size of Jupiter—hiding in the swirling disk of gas and dust surrounding a young star.

Earlier observations of this star, called MP Mus, suggested that it was all alone without any planets in orbit around it, surrounded by a featureless cloud of gas and dust.

However, a second look at MP Mus, using a combination of results from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission, suggest that the star is not alone after all.

The international team of astronomers, led by the University of Cambridge, detected a large gas giant in the star’s protoplanetary disk: the pancake-like cloud of gases, dust and ice where the process of planet formation begins. This is the first time that Gaia has detected an exoplanet within a protoplanetary disk. The results, reported in the journal Nature Astronomy, suggest that similar methods could be useful in the hunt for young planets around other stars.