Astronomers this month released the largest collection of sharp, detailed images of debris disks around young stars, showcasing the great variety of shapes and sizes of stellar systems during their prime planet-forming years.
Astronomers this month released the largest collection of sharp, detailed images of debris disks around young stars, showcasing the great variety of shapes and sizes of stellar systems during their prime planet-forming years. Surprisingly, nearly all showed evidence of planets.
The images were obtained over a period of four years by a precision instrument, the Gemini Planet Imager (GPI), mounted on the 8-meter Gemini South telescope in Chile. The GPI uses a state-of-the-art adaptive optics system to remove atmospheric blur, providing the sharpest images to date of many of these disks.
Ground-based instruments like GPI, which is being upgraded to conduct similar observations in the northern sky from the Gemini North Telescope in Hawaii, can be a way to screen stars with suspected debris disks to determine which are worth targeting by more powerful, but expensive, telescopes to find planets — in particular, habitable planets. Several 20-, 30- and 40-meter telescopes, such as the Giant Magellan Telescope and the Extremely Large Telescope, will come online in the next couple of decades, while the orbiting James Webb Space Telescope is expected to be launched in 2021.
Read more at: University of California - Berkeley
This figure shows the dust rings around young stars captured by the Gemini Planet Imager Exoplanet Survey, or GPIES. The rings show a diversity of shapes and sizes, made more extreme by the different projections of the rings on the sky. (Photo Credit: UC Berkeley image by Thomas Esposito)
