Washington, Oct 20 (ANI): Astronomers have for the first time spotted a disk of gas and dust around a Sun-like star that shows spiral-arm-like structures.
These features may provide clues to the presence of embedded but as-yet-unseen planets, they say.
"Detailed computer simulations have shown us that the gravitational pull of a planet inside a circumstellar disk can perturb gas and dust, creating spiral arms," said Carol Grady, an astronomer with Eureka Scientific, Inc., who is based at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. She revealed the image today at the Signposts of Planets meeting hosted this week at the center.
"Now, for the first time, we're seeing these dynamical features," she added.
Grady's research is part of the Strategic Exploration of Exoplanets and Disks with Subaru (SEEDS), a five-year-long near-infrared study of young stars and their surrounding dust disks using the Subaru Telescope atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii.
"What we're finding is that once these systems reach ages of a few million years, their disks begin to show a wealth of structure-rings, divots, gaps and now spiral features," said John Wisniewski, a collaborator at the University of Washington in Seattle. "Many of these structures could be caused by planets within the disks."
The newly imaged disk surrounds SAO 206462, an 8.7-magnitude star located about 456 light-years away in the constellation Lupus.
Astronomers estimate that the system is only about 9 million years old. The gas-rich disk spans some 14 billion miles, which is more than twice the size of Pluto's orbit in our own solar system.
The Subaru near-infrared image reveals a pair of spiral features arcing along the outer disk. Theoretical models show that a single embedded planet may produce a spiral arm on each side of a disk. The structures around SAO 206462 do not form a matched pair, suggesting the presence of two unseen worlds, one for each arm. (ANI)
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