December 13, 2024
[Press Release] ALMA Reveals the Birthplace of a Planetary System: dust accumulation to form a new planet outside just-formed planets
Abstract
The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) has successfully observed a site of planet formation by detecting a high concentration of dust grains, a planet-forming material, outside the orbits of just-formed planets. An international research team led by Kiyoaki Doi, then a Ph.D. student at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ)/ The Graduate University for Advanced Studies, SOKENDAI and currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, performed high-resolution observations of a protoplanetary disk around a young star called PDS 70 at a wavelength of 3 mm with ALMA. The object hosts two known planets, and the new ALMA observations revealed a localized accumulation of dust grains outside the planetary orbits. This finding suggests that already-formed planets accumulate the material for a planet and facilitate the potential formation of the next planet. This work contributes to revealing the formation process of planetary systems consisting of multiple planets, like the Solar System.
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