Ever wonder how stars and planets form? New clues have been found in the protoplanetary system Herbig-Haro 30 by the James Webb Space Telescope, Hubble and the Earth-bound telescope ALMA. The observations show, that large dust grains are more concentrated into a central disk where they can form planets. The featured image from Webb shows many attributes of the HH-30 system. Jets of particles are being expelled vertically, shown in red, while a dark dust-rich disk is seen across the center, blocking the light from the star or stars still forming there. Blue-reflecting dust is seen in an arc above and below the central disk, although why a tail appears on the lower left is currently unknown. Studying how planets form in HH 30 can help astronomers better understand how planets in our own Solar System once formed, including the Earth.

PDS 70b-c, The Baby Planets

Stars form when dense clouds of cold hydrogen gas begin to collapse under gravitational weight, pulling in more and more gas and dust until the amount is sufficient for nuclear fusion at the core to begin.

Although it's not clearly understood at what point the star stops accumulating mass, what is known is that most forming stars have a huge amount material swirling around them (an accretion disk) and it's believed this is where Planets begin to form.

PDS 70 is a K type star (orange and slightly smaller than our Sun) around 370 light years away in Southern constellation of Centaurus, it's not quite yet entered it's stable main sequence phase but Hubble has already been able to detect 2 planets, more than that, it's able to actually visibly see them in Ultra Violet light.

What can be seen is that a thick disk of dust and gas exists up to around 20 Au from the star, and there's a gap out to around 40 Au. This is similar to the location of Uranus and Neptune in our own Solar System, however PDS 70b has grown to be around 5 times the mass of Jupiter, making it a rather large gas giant, while it's further out PDS 70c is around the same size as Jupiter.

The clearing suggests that the planet has already actively pulled most of the dust and gas between it and PDS 70c, and in addition, a small accretion disk of it's own can be seen around the larger planet.

It is suggested that the planets that are still in the phase of forming are beginning to enter adulthood, but the very fact we are able to observe them and watch the process is allowing astronomers to gain a front seat on planetary formation, at least in the PDS 70 system.

One of the greatest mysteries that life on Earth holds is, “Are we alone?”

At NASA, we are working hard to answer this question. We’re scouring the universe, hunting down planets that could potentially support life. Thanks to ground-based and space-based telescopes, including Kepler and TESS, we’ve found more than 4,000 planets outside our solar system, which are called exoplanets. Our search for new planets is ongoing — but we’re also trying to identify which of the 4,000 already discovered could be habitable.

Unfortunately, we can’t see any of these planets up close. The closest exoplanet to our solar system orbits the closest star to Earth, Proxima Centauri, which is just over 4 light years away. With today’s technology, it would take a spacecraft 75,000 years to reach this planet, known as Proxima Centauri b.

How do we investigate a planet that we can’t see in detail and can’t get to? How do we figure out if it could support life?

This is where computer models come into play. First we take the information that we DO know about a far-off planet: its size, mass and distance from its star. Scientists can infer these things by watching the light from a star dip as a planet crosses in front of it, or by measuring the gravitational tugging on a star as a planet circles it.

We put these scant physical details into equations that comprise up to a million lines of computer code. The code instructs our Discover supercomputer to use our rules of nature to simulate global climate systems. Discover is made of thousands of computers packed in racks the size of vending machines that hum in a deafening chorus of data crunching. Day and night, they spit out 7 quadrillion calculations per second — and from those calculations, we paint a picture of an alien world.

While modeling work can’t tell us if any exoplanet is habitable or not, it can tell us whether a planet is in the range of candidates to follow up with more intensive observations. 

One major goal of simulating climates is to identify the most promising planets to turn to with future technology, like the James Webb Space Telescope, so that scientists can use limited and expensive telescope time most efficiently.

Additionally, these simulations are helping scientists create a catalog of potential chemical signatures that they might detect in the atmospheres of distant worlds. Having such a database to draw from will help them quickly determine the type of planet they’re looking at and decide whether to keep observing or turn their telescopes elsewhere.

Learn more about exoplanet exploration, here. 

The FINAL CHAPTER of La Destinee is posted! I do have an epilogue that is up now, too. But, this story is complete. I took some time to write my thanks this morning to all of you, but it always seems that words cannot express the true magnitude of my gratefulness to each of you who spends your time reading what I write.

THANK YOU does't seem enough. But I am so very grateful for your time. It means more to me than you know for taking time for me and the world I have created on these pages. I hope you like the new world and the new characters I have introduced. And I hope that somehow this has unleashed something inside of you that lets your mind go, and maybe one day create something special that you can share with others. Writing, art, sewing, dance, whatever you have wanted to do, the Arts will be there for you.

It’s a shame the International Astronomical Union insists on choosing “dignified” names for planets (call them dwarf planets if you want; Planet Pluto Forever 😂) because some of the placeholder names have been terrific. The latest being Farout, which at the moment is the furthest-out objects to be discovered in our solar system.

Now, as a fan of The Illuminatus Trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson, the fact we have a dwarf planet called Eris is pretty damn cool (you probably need to read that series of books or the underground classic Principia Discordia to get why), imagine if the original placeholder name Xena had been kept. (And yes it was named for the TV character.) Even better is that, for a brief time, until a small number of scientists demoted Pluto, Xena/Eris was actually the official tenth planet of our solar system.

Right now there’s another dwarf planet way out there that was discovered around Halloween; its placeholder name is The Goblin. With all due respect to all the assorted Roman and Greek gods that have yet to have planets named for them - the solar system will be a poorer place the day they inevitably give that dwarf planet a “proper” name and The Goblin becomes a footnote in its Wikipedia article.