Cookie Consent by Free Privacy Policy website ESO — SPHERE Reveals Fascinating Zoo of Discs Around Young Stars
april 13, 2018 - e.s.o.

ESO — SPHERE Reveals Fascinating Zoo of Discs Around Young Stars

New images from the SPHERE instrument on ESO’s Very Large #telescope are revealing the dusty discs surrounding nearby young stars in greater detail than previously achieved. They show a bizarre variety of shapes, sizes and structures, including the likely effects of planets still in the process of forming.

The SPHERE instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile allows astronomers to suppress the brilliant light of nearby stars in order to obtain a better view of the regions surrounding them. This collection of new SPHERE images is just a sample of the wide variety of dusty discs being found around young stars.

These discs are wildly different in size and shape — some contain bright rings, some dark rings, and some even resemble hamburgers. They also differ dramatically in appearance depending on their orientation in the sky — from circular face-on discs to narrow discs seen almost edge-on.

SPHERE’s primary task is to discover and study giant exoplanets orbiting nearby stars using direct imaging. But the instrument is also one of the best tools in existence to obtain images of the discs around young stars — regions where planets may be forming. Studying such discs is critical to investigating the link between disc properties and the formation and presence of planets.

Many of the young stars shown here come from a new study of T Tauri stars, a class of stars that are very young (less than 10 million years old) and vary in brightness. The discs around these stars contain gas, dust, and planetesimals — the building blocks of planets and the progenitors of planetary systems.

These images also show what our own Solar System may have looked like in the early stages of its formation, more than four billion years ago.

Most of the images presented were obtained as part of the DARTTS-S (Discs ARound T Tauri Stars with SPHERE) survey. The distances of the targets ranged from 230 to 550 light-years away from Earth. For comparison, the Milky Way is roughly 100 000 light-years across, so these stars are, relatively speaking, very close to Earth. But even at this distance, it is very challenging to obtain good images of the faint reflected light from discs, since they are outshone by the dazzling light of their parent stars.

Further information in the press release to download

Related news

december 15, 2023
october 19, 2023
july 26, 2022

Big Astronomy: People, Places, Discoveries is an award-winning bilingual planetarium show that takes viewers beyond the dome to be...

Astronomers have long sought to map the night skies, not only to fill in our picture of the cosmos we inhabit, but also to support...

NSF’s NOIRLab-operated Gemini telescopes aid in revealing that seemingly lonely bursts came from previously undiscovered galaxies ...