Images of 14 protoplanetary disks around young solar-type stars. The false color images show the brightness of the emission from the warm dust in the disk. Red represents the brightest emission and purple the dimmest emission. The majority of the stars are in the Taurus region of the sky which is one of the nearest locations of young stars.
Credit: CARMA
When a star is "born", it is often surrounded by a rotating disk of gas and dust. These disks will likely form planetary systems analogous to our own Solar System. One of the main goals in astronomy today is to understand how planets form in these disks. An important clue to understand this process is measuring the location and amount of gas and dust.
When a star is "born", it is often surrounded by a rotating disk of gas and dust. These disks will likely form planetary systems analogous to our own Solar System. One of the main goals in astronomy today is to understand how planets form in these disks. An important clue to understand this process is measuring the location and amount of gas and dust.
The CARMA, Combined Array for Research in Millimeter-wave Astronomy, has imaged the dust around a sample of 14 disks around young stars. These stars formed only one million years ago and any planets are just beginning to form.
These disks tend to be larger in size than our solar system, and contain enough material to form Jupiter-size planets. Interestingly, the disks have different morphologies. In some disks, the dust is smoothly distributed, while in others, the dust is "missing" from the inner part of the disk close to the star. The differences in the morphology may reflect that various stages of planet formation in these disks.
The work is led by Laura Perez, Andrea Isella, and John Carpenter at Caltech, and Woojin Kwon at the University of Illinois
Source: CARMA
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