Baby planets are born exceptionally fast, study suggests

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https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/06/missing-mass-planet-formation-found-young-disks-gas-and-dust

Source:  By Adam Mann, Science Magazine. 

Excerpt: Planets are forming around young stars far faster than scientists expected, arising in a cosmic eye blink of less than half a million years, according to a new study. ...Planets coalesce from massive disks of gas and dust that surround newborn stars. But detecting these embryonic worlds is difficult because both the star and the disk shine far brighter than any tiny planet. To find out how much material is available for planet formation, researchers have used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile to weigh the disks around young stars between 1 million and 3 million years old. Past studies found that some lacked the mass to form even a single Jupiter-size world. The results suggested astronomers were either overlooking some hidden reservoir of material or they were looking too late in the planet-forging process, after growing protoplanets had already vacuumed up much of the material. The answer, says Łukasz Tychoniec, a graduate student at Leiden Observatory and lead author of the new paper [https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.02812], is that “we need to look earlier instead of [looking] for missing mass.”... 

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