Astronomers Think They've Captured The Birth Of The Youngest Planet Ever
Two views of the gas and dust around star HD 100546 On the left is a visible-light image, from the Hubble Space Telescope. On the right is an infrared image, from the Very Large Telescope. In both pictures, the red cross marks the location of the new protoplanet. ESO/NASA/ESA/Ardila et al.Spotting baby planets Astronomers have likely caught one of the first glimpses of a planet being born. Over the past few years, other astronomy teams have found evidence of other still-forming baby planets, but this object may be the youngest yet. "The other planets are a little older," says Sascha Quanz, an astronomer at ETH Zurich in Switzerland who led the discovery, in a phone interview. Using the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile, Quanz directly observed a planet still in the midst of a disk of gas and dust that surrounds its central star, HD 100546, located 335...