Scientists associate long shadows moving along the outer regions of the protoplanetary disk of the star HD 135344B with the birth of new planets in the inner regions.
An international team of astronomers was able to examine the details of the structure of the protoplanetary disk of gas and dust around the star HD 135344B. They managed to see spiral arms and moving shadows, which have not yet been explained. This is reported by an article accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal and presented in the open access in the arXiv.org preprint library.
Earlier, Tomas Stolker from the University of Amsterdam and his colleagues have already managed to take a fairly clear picture of the vicinity of the star HD135344B. They used the new adaptive-optics coronographic system SPHERE installed at the VLT European observatory in Chile. This allowed in the end to get a whole series of images of what is happening in 450 light years in the gas and dust disk, where the process of birth of the planetary system is taking place.
The adaptive optics of the SPHERE instrument helped to eliminate the distortion introduced into the picture by the earth's atmosphere. Coronograph and polarizing filters allowed to block the light of the star itself, which is invisible in the images / & copy; Tomas Stolker, University of Amsterdam
The researchers managed to see pronounced spiral arms, probably formed under the influence of one or more rather large protoplanets, which in the future will turn into gas giants similar to Jupiter or Saturn. There are also fluctuations in the brightness of the outer regions of the gas-dust disk, apparently caused by shadows from some objects or processes in the inner, rapidly rotating regions. According to scientists, most likely, they are thrown away by dense lumps of vortices or accumulations of solid particles.
“Until two years ago, we suspected that the shadows on the outer disk were caused by some process in the inner regions,” says Thomas Stolker. "Unfortunately, we cannot see them directly, even from SPHERE."
Sergey Vasiliev