The Hubble Space Telescope has discovered a huge gaseous planet forming in a new, non-standard model.
The “accumulative core” model has been proposed as a standard for large gaseous planets such as Jupiter, which consist of accretion of gas giants ranging from dust grains to rocks by collision and accretion of cores larger than Earth. An example is Jupiter or Saturn which formed at a distance of 5 to 10 times the distance between the Sun and Earth (1 AU).
However, recently, a research team from the Japanese National Astronomical Observatory captured a gaseous, supermassive planet that forms under conditions in which there are not enough planets to form a giant nucleus and presented it as evidence for the “disk instability” hypothesis. . The results of this study were published in the scientific journal Nature Astronomy.
The disk instability hypothesis is a theory that may have been formed by the process of gas disk disintegration and fragmentation due to gravitational instability. Simply put, it’s a top-down theory that the protoplanets formed when gas clouds were pulled together by gravity. This contradicts the nuclear accretion hypothesis, which is a bottom-up central growth model.
The gas planet discovered by Hubble is AB Auriga b, about 531 light years from Earth. It forms in the disk of a protoplanetary system around a young star.
This gaseous planet orbits the young star “AB Auriga”, which is only about 2 million years old, at a distance of about 13.7 billion km. The research team explains that it takes a long time to form using the standard model, the nuclear accretion theory.
The research team led by Dr. Thane Curry came to this conclusion by comparing the appearance of the AB Auriga b as seen using the Hubble Space Telescope and the Subaru Telescope in Hawaii. In the wake of the planet, a vortex of disk material was also observed, a phenomenon predicted by the disk instability hypothesis.
“Nature is intelligent and can form planets in many ways,” Curry said. “This study was possible thanks to the Hubble telescope, which accumulated data for a long time,” he added.
Reporter Seo Hee-won, online electronic newspaper ([email protected])
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