NASA Hubble offers glimpse of a Jupiter-sized, still-forming planet feed off star

NASA‘s Hubble Space Telescope on Friday captured the rare stunning glimpse of a Jupiter-sized, still-forming planet engulfing the material surrounding a young star. The exoplanet dubbed as the PDS 70b is located 370 light-years from Earth in the constellation Centaurus and orbits the orange dwarf star PDS 70. According to NASA’s statement, the tiny exoplanet has two actively forming planets inside a huge disk of dust and gas encircling the star.

[The European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope caught the first clear image of a forming planet, PDS 70b, around a dwarf star. Credits: ESO, VLT, André B. Müller/ESO]

“By employing Hubble’s ultraviolet light (UV) sensitivity, researchers got a unique look at radiation from extremely hot gas falling onto the planet, allowing them to directly measure the planet’s mass growth rate for the first time,” a Hubble’s release stated. It added planet PDS 70b is encircled by its own gas-and-dust disk that’s siphoning material from the vastly larger circumstellar disk.

Scientists observed that the magnetic field lines extend from the planet’s circumplanetary disk down to the exoplanet’s atmosphere and funnels material to the planet’s surface. The PDS 70b sucks the material from the younger star and builds mass over millions of years. Using Hubble’s unique ultraviolet sensitivities, researchers were able to measure the mass growth rate of PDS 70b for the first time which began forming approximately 5 million years ago. 

“Thirty-one years after launch, we’re still finding new ways to use Hubble,” Bowler added. “Yifan’s observing strategy and post-processing technique will open new windows into studying similar systems, or even the same system, repeatedly with Hubble. With future observations, we could potentially discover when the majority of the gas and dust falls onto their planets and if it does so at a constant rate.”

[Hubble observations pinpoint planet PDS 70b. Credit: NASA]

[This illustration of the newly forming exoplanet PDS 70b shows how material may be falling onto the giant world as it builds up mass. Credit: NASA]

'Insight' into how gas giant planets formed

The Jupiter-sized, still-forming planet orbiting the orange dwarf star bulked up five times the mass of the solar system’s largest planet. “This system is so exciting because we can witness the formation of a planet,” Yifan Zhou from the University of Texas at Austin said in a statement “This is the youngest bona fide planet Hubble has ever directly imaged,” he added. “Hubble’s observations allowed us to estimate how fast the planet is gaining mass,” Zhou continued. 

As per NASA, the present measured accretion rate of the exoplanet has dwindled to the point where, if the rate remained steady for another million years, the planet would only increase by approximately an additional 1/100th of a Jupiter-mass. “Our measurements suggest that the planet is in the tail end of its formation process,” said scientists Zhou and Bowler. Observing the PDS 70b’s formation gives scientists an insight into how the gas giant planets formed around the Sun some 4.6 billion years ago.