For the first time, astronomers have detected the presence of a disk around a planet outside our Solar System - a discovery that will provide new information on how moons and planets form in young stellar systems.
The circumplanetary disk is around 500 times bigger than Saturn's rings and orbits a Jupiter-like planet scientists call PDS 70c. It is one of two colossal planets similar to Jupiter that encircle a star 400 light-years from Earth, Space.com said.
Researchers from the European Southern Observatory (ESO) discovered PDS 70c in 2019 using their Very Large Telescope (VLT).
This circumplanetary disk and its counterpart, PDS 70b, are still in the early stages of development and provide a distinct research opportunity to observe planets and moons in their infancy, Space.com said.
Miriam Keppler, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute and study co-author, discovered PDS 70b in 2018.
Scientists have identified many disks surrounding distant stars, and moon-forming disks around planets like this have been thought to have existed before, but this is the first time such a system has been definitively identified, according to Phys.org.
"Our work presents a clear detection of a disk in which satellites could be forming," Myriam Benisty, a researcher at the University of Grenoble in France, said.
Benisty is also a researcher at the University of Chile, who led the new study published Thursday in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
An international group of scientists and astronomers discovered the disk while analyzing the planetary system using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array of telescopes in Chile.
"These new observations are also extremely important to prove theories of planet formation that could not be tested until now," Jaehan Bae, study co-author and a researcher from the Earth and Planets Laboratory of the Carnegie Institution for Science, said in a statement.
"In short, it is still unclear when, where, and how planets and moons form," Stefano Facchini, an astrophysics research fellow at ESO and joint author on the research, said.
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