The dust around the binary star system HD 142527. (credit: ALMA)
At the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Rice University's Andrea Isella began his talk with words that can start a brawl among astronomy fans: "Everybody knows we have these eight beautiful planets in our Solar System." But he continued with words we can all agree on: we'd like to know how they got here and whether they represent a typical assortment we'd expect to see around other stars.
To answer both of these questions, we need to understand planet formation. And the best way to do that is to image as many systems as we can find that are in the process of forming planets. That process poses a number of challenges, however. In astronomical terms, planet formation is fast, taking place in 10 million years or so, and the process takes place in a diffuse, dusty disk that makes it difficult to do observations at visible wavelengths.
But we now have staggeringly precise images of these disks, thanks to the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, or ALMA. ALMA is capable of identifying the chemical composition of the disks, along with irregularities in their distribution and the motion of different parts of the disk. Isella and other researchers were on hand to tell what we've learned from this sort of information.
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