Planet Formation: Do Planets Come From The Fluffy Seeds Of Dust Particles?

Planet formation is the most exciting aspects of space science. One of the components of this formation is dust and gas. The process might take time and may consider millions of years for the planet to evolve.

The Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast Exoplanet Research (SPHERE) instrument on European Southern Observatory's large telescope in Chile was used to study an explicit type of polarization of radio waves imminent from the 5-million-year-old star. One of the instruments used was the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) which has been measuring the dust particles around a newborn star through a radio wave polarization.

The SPHERE went live in 2014 and used to explore the complex interplay between the protoplanetary disks and the newborn planets building blocks. The star HD 142527 is located 500 light years away and doubles the mass of the sun.  It possesses protoplanetary disks. These disks are the ring of dust and gas that scientists believe forms the building blocks of a planetary system. The growing planets' various forms of discs are spiral arms, shadowed voids and vast rings.

The study that was conducted by National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ) and lead by Akimasa Kataoka of Heidelberg University and the used radio waves emitted by the star to study the polarization of the scattered particles in the ring. These particles left a polarization fingerprint which helped scientists to determine the size of these materials. Almost each dust particles were smaller than previous research which has 150 micrometers wide based on polarization and ten times smaller than the previous estimation.

The previous research estimated that the size of these particles is based on radio emissions, while the new study confirmed that dust particles are spherical and fluffy. These fluffy agglomerations of smaller dust particles formed together to larger and more complex dust particles which lead to the initiation of planet birth. The measuring of these dust particles is just the first big step. More research will clear theories how planets formed from these fluffy seeds of dust particles.