Tech
Astronomers discover 3 new hidden planets
Three baby planets have been found in our own solar system by pioneering scientists.
They are the youngest planets ever seen, and represent a discovery that is “at the frontier of science”. Researchers used a breakthrough new technique to find the newly-formed worlds around a young star relatively close to our own.
They now hope they can find yet more of the strange worlds, using the same technique. And the discovery could shed lights on how planets form at their very earliest stages.
Read also: Google bans AI for weapon use
Thousands of exoplanets have been discovered already, largely using the Kepler space telescope, which watches for the dips of light that they cause as they pass in front of their star. But protoplanets of this kind cannot be found using those techniques.
“Though thousands of exoplanets have been discovered in the last few decades, detecting protoplanets is at the frontier of science,” said Christophe Pinte of Monash University in Australia and lead author on one of the two papers.
The scientists found the planets by looking out for disturbances in the gas-filled disk around the star. They looked for a particular kind of light that is emitted by the movement of carbon monoxide – which allows them to understand how the gas in the disk is churning around.
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