Planet formation happens rapidly after the onset of star formation, and certainly while the star is still interacting with its siblings in the stellar nursery. Many of the discs had features and structures that can be attributed to the presence of fully formed, Jupiter-like planets. The first, and subsequent, images from Alma were nothing short of spectacular. The field of star and planet formation underwent a revolution in late 2014 when the first images of planet-forming discs around stars were seen with the Atacama Large Millimetre Array (Alma) telescope in the Chilean desert. It is from these dust particles that planets are (eventually) formed.Īlso Read | These tourists like to gaze at the sky This was (and still is) explained as originating from small dust particles (100th of a centimetre) orbiting the star in a disc of material. Observations of the light from young stars display an unexpected excess of infrared radiation. We have had indirect evidence of this for more than 30 years. Our new paper, published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, shows how massive stars in such stellar nurseries can steal planets away from each other – and what the signs of such theft are.Īlmost immediately after young stars are born, planetary systems begin to form around them. After a few million years, the groups of stars dissipate, populating the Milky Way with more stars. Violent interactions, in which stars exchange energy, occur frequently, but not for long. These stellar nurseries are densely populated places, where hundreds of thousands of stars often reside in the same volume of space that the Sun inhabits on its own. We almost exclusively observe young stars in groups, so-called stellar nurseries, where they brush shoulders with stellar siblings. It sits on its own, four light years away from the nearest star, with only its planetary system for the company. Our Sun has a rather lonely existence in the Milky Way galaxy.
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