HL Tau is a young star, only about a million years old. Despite its young age, the star is already busy at making a family.
Baby Picture
Every now and then in astronomy we’ll get an image that lets us actually see phenomena we have previously just deduced from other observations. The image above is one of them. It was taken by the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), and shows an exoplanetary system in the process of forming. This isn’t an artistic rendering, it’s an actual image.
Out of Beta
Observations from the ALMA telescope array has made some interesting observations of carbon monoxide in the vicinity of the star Beta Pictoris. The results have been published recently in Science, and it tells an interesting story about comets and planetary formation.
Centrifuge
IRAS 04368+2557 is a protostar about 450 light years from us. It is a particularly young protostar, at about 300,000 years. Because of its age and proximity, it provides an excellent opportunity to study the early stages of stellar and planetary formation.
When Worlds Collide
The discovery of protoplanetary disks such as this one agree with the nebular hypothesis, which posits that a star and planetary system form together. The star collapses out of a nebula, and it forms an accretion disk around itself, out of which the planets form.