Keith Cooper is a freelance science journalist and editor in the United Kingdom, and has a degree in physics and astrophysics from the University of Manchester.
The largest planetary construction site ever seen, spanning hundreds of billions of miles in size, may very well be cast in an enormous shadow that accentuates its bizarre appearance. In short, it looks like a cosmic butterfly — and, for years, it was ignored.
Berghea didn't know for sure what it was, but it appeared to have two parallel lobes with a dark lane between them — typical of an edge-on planet-forming disk. Bright parts in such an object represent dust-scattered light in the upper echelons of the disk, while the dark lane is the equivalent of our's ecliptic plane, where most of the material is concentrated. It is this dense section of material that blocks and absorbs the light of a system's central star.
"From the SMA data we can also weigh the dust and gas in this planetary nursery, which we found has enough material to form many giant planets — and out to distances over 300 times farther out than the distance between the sun and "The data from the SMA offer us the smoking-gun evidence that … it is rotating around a star likely two to four times more massive than our own sun,” said Monsch. It's possible that this star is still growing as material from the disk falls inwards and accretes onto it.
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