First image of a newborn planet, it is shrouded in clouds

The first moments of life of a newborn planet have been photographed, as it makes its way through the disk of gas and dust around the young dwarf star PDS 70, about 370 light years from Earth. The research, published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics and coordinated by Miriam Keppler and Andre' Mueller, of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany, also involved a large group of Italian researchers from the National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF). Christened PDS 70b, the latest planet in chronological order of the approximately 4.000 outside the Solar System discovered so far was observed by the hunter of new worlds Sphere, installed on the Very Large Telescope (VLT) of the European Southern Observatory (ESO). It is located about three billion kilometers from its star, more or less the distance between Uranus and the Sun. The first data suggest the presence of clouds in its atmosphere. The analyses also show that it is a gas giant with a mass greater than Jupiter, and surface temperatures of 1000 C. In the image, the planet is clearly visible as a bright disk near the center of the photo, obscured by a coronagraph, a mask that blocks the light of the parent star around which the planet orbits, allowing astronomers to observe it. "For Raffele Gratton, of the Astronomical Observatory of the INAF in Padua, one of the authors of the discovery, "this shot, which captured PDS 70b in the early stages of its existence, is another important piece in understanding the mechanisms of planetary formation".