Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Space
  3. News

Hubble observes a giant planet growing as it gobbles up dust and gas

By
This illustration of the newly forming exoplanet PDS 70b shows how material may be falling onto the giant world as it builds up mass. By employing Hubble’s ultraviolet light (UV) sensitivity, researchers got a unique look at radiation from extremely hot gas falling onto the planet, allowing them to directly measure the planet’s mass growth rate for the first time.
This illustration of the newly forming exoplanet PDS 70b shows how material may be falling onto the giant world as it builds up mass. By employing Hubble’s ultraviolet light (UV) sensitivity, researchers got a unique look at radiation from extremely hot gas falling onto the planet, allowing them to directly measure the planet’s mass growth rate for the first time. SCIENCE: McDonald Observatory–University of Texas, Yifan Zhou (UT) ILLUSTRATION: NASA, ESA, STScI, Joseph Olmsted (STScI)

Planets come in many compositions and sizes, and they can grow considerably larger than even the gas giants in our solar system. One such giant planet, PDS 70b, is two to three times the radius of Jupiter, and around three times its mass as well. Now, Hubble has made a rare direct observation of this planet to learn about how such large planets grow.

The planet’s host star, orange dwarf PDS 70, is located 370 light-years away in the constellation of Centaurus, and this is one of the relatively few systems in which a planet has been directly imaged. Most of the time, exoplanets are detected by seeing how light coming from their host star changes, from which the presence of planets can be inferred. But occasionally, a planet is big enough to be seen directly, like the chunky PDS 70b.

Recommended Videos

Not only could Hubble observe the planet, but it could also see how fast it grows by observing radiation from hot gas which is falling toward it. The planet is moving through a cloud of dust and gas around the star, and it gathers up material as it travels. The researchers believe that although the planet is still growing, it will soon come to the end of its growth phase.

Related

“We just don’t know very much about how giant planets grow,” said one of the researchers, Brendan Bowler of the University of Texas at Austin, in a statement. “This planetary system gives us the first opportunity to witness material falling onto a planet. Our results open up a new area for this research.”

“This system is so exciting because we can witness the formation of a planet,” said another researcher, Yifan Zhou, also of the University of Texas at Austin. “This is the youngest bona fide planet Hubble has ever directly imaged.”

Learning about how this planet is growing can also teach us about how planets like Jupiter formed in our solar system. It too may have grown by scooping up material from a disk of dust and gas.

“Thirty-one years after launch, we’re still finding new ways to use Hubble,” Bowler said. “Yifan’s observing strategy and post-processing technique will open new windows into studying similar systems, or even the same system, repeatedly with Hubble. With future observations, we could potentially discover when the majority of the gas and dust falls onto their planets and if it does so at a constant rate.”

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Georgina Torbet
Georgina Torbet
Space Writer
Georgina is the Digital Trends space writer, covering human space exploration, planetary science, and cosmology. She…
CHEOPS planet-hunter detects four rarely seen mini-Neptunes
Artist's impression of Cheops, ESA's Characterising Exoplanet Satellite, in orbit above Earth.

The European Space Agency (ESA)'s CHEOPS satellite has discovered four new exoplanets -- and they are a hard-to-detect type called a mini-Neptune. These planets are notable because they are the "missing link" between rocky Earth-sized planets and ice giants like Neptune. They are thought to be very common in our galaxy, but they are hard to spot because they are small and cool compared to the big, bright hot Jupiters which are most commonly detected by exoplanet-hunting telescopes.

Mini-Neptunes do orbit close to their stars, typically being found closer to their stars than Mercury is to the sun. However, hot Jupiters orbit even closer -- which gives them very high surface temperatures of over 1,000 degrees Celsius. Mini-Neptunes have relatively cooler surface temperatures of around 300 degrees Celsius.

Read more
Hubble scientists create tool for erasing satellite trails from images
This image captures the streak of an Earth-orbiting artificial satellite crossing Hubble's field of view during an observation of "The Mice" interacting galaxies (NGC 4676). A typical satellite trail is very thin and will affect less than 0.5% of a single Hubble exposure. Though in this case the satellite overlaps a portion of the target galaxy, the observation quality is not affected. That's because multiple exposures are taken of the same target. And the satellite trail is not in other frames. Developers at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, have software that identifies the bad pixels from the satellite photobombing, the extent to which they affect the image, and then flags them. When flagged, scientists can recover the full field of view. Even as the number of satellites increases over the decade, these tools for cleaning the images will still be applicable.

With ever-increasing numbers of satellites in the sky, astronomers have repeatedly expressed worry over how these satellites could impact scientific research. Earlier this year, a study of Hubble Space Telescope observations showed how some images were being ruined by streaks of light coming from satellites -- and while only a small percentage of Hubble images were affected, the authors raised concerns that with the projected number of satellites set to explode in the next decade, the problem could become serious.

Now, astronomers at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), which runs Hubble, have come up with a tool to deal with satellite streaks in Hubble images. "We developed a new tool to identify satellite trails that is an improvement over the previous satellite software because it is much more sensitive. So we think it will be better for identifying and removing satellite trails in Hubble images," said Dave Stark of STScI in a statement.

Read more
Hubble goes hunting for elusive medium-sized black holes
A Hubble Space Telescope image of the globular star cluster, Messier 4. The cluster is a dense collection of several hundred thousand stars. Astronomers suspect that an intermediate-mass black hole, weighing as much as 800 times the mass of our Sun, is lurking, unseen, at its core.

There's something odd about the black holes discovered to date. We've found plenty of smaller black holes, with masses less than 100 times that of the sun, and plenty of huge black holes, with masses millions or even billions of times that of the sun. But we've found hardly any black holes in the intermediate mass range, arguably not enough to confirm that they even exist, and it's not really clear why.

Now, astronomers are using the Hubble Space Telescope to hunt for these missing black holes. Hubble has previously found some evidence of black holes in this intermediate range, and now it is being used to search for examples within a few thousand light-years of Earth.

Read more